Vetted API Development Professionals

Danny Beck

Screened ReferencesStrong rec.

Executive Technology Leader (CTO/Head of Engineering) specializing in platform rebuilds, AI, and Web3

California, USA11y exp

“Startup leader with 15+ years of experience, including lead engineer and founding CTO roles across 5 companies from pre-seed to Series A. Actively develops personal venture ideas by creating product specs/SLAs/business plans and engaging in investor pitch sessions and incubators, with a strong focus on early product-market fit via validated learning and data-driven pivots.”

Serge Alhalbi

Screened ReferencesStrong rec.

Mid-level Robotics & AI Engineer specializing in autonomous systems

Tulsa, OK4y exp

“Robotics software engineer with deep ROS2 experience who owned the perception stack for an automated C. elegans manipulation system—building YOLO-based worm segmentation plus OCR label reading and integrating it into a MoveIt2 pipeline with real-time latency constraints. Also deploying ROS2 on an AgileX Tracer with ZED depth camera for vision-based person following and working on SLAM/sensor fusion, with additional production-style ML deployment experience (Dockerized FastAPI + PyTorch on AWS EC2 with CI/CD).”

“Robotics engineer who built and scaled a distributed perception stack on a Unitree Go1 quadruped, coordinating 5 Jetson Nanos and a Raspberry Pi to capture, aggregate, and stream multi-camera video in real time via UDP/GStreamer and custom ROS nodes. Also implemented a YOLOv9-based detection pipeline enhanced with Grad-CAM-driven selective image enhancement (e.g., MIRNet/UFormer) to improve real-time detections and robot reactions to visual stimuli.”

“AI automation builder who shipped an OpenAI-powered weekly "trending AI tools" WoW reporting system (65 categories) that reduced a 6–7 hour manual process to ~10 minutes at negligible API cost. Also building a RAG-based content creation prompt engine that turns PDFs into storyboards with fact-checking/traceback to source lines, plus experience with AWS deployment components (Lambda, ECR, App Runner, Bedrock, API Gateway) and GitHub Actions.”

“Hands-on LLM/RAG engineer with production experience improving retrieval quality and stability by addressing messy data, vector DB inaccuracy, and top-K issues—ultimately redesigning to hybrid search with tuned keyword/semantic weighting and MCP-based data supplementation. Also brings strong AKS/Kubernetes deployment experience, optimizing CI/CD speed via lightweight local Docker validation and decomposing pods to avoid full rebuilds, plus a metrics-driven approach to agent/workflow testing and traceability.”

“Backend/platform engineer with payments and insurance domain experience (Cognizant), owning high-volume production systems end-to-end. Shipped a Spring Boot payment tokenization service with strong observability and phased migration that cut transaction latency ~30% and improved payment efficiency ~25%. Also productionized an ML-driven financial health/risk analytics pipeline with near real-time dashboards across 70+ schools, emphasizing interpretability, data quality, and drift monitoring.”

“Built and shipped a production LLM-powered decision system that replaced a slow, inconsistent manual review process by turning messy text into structured, auditable outputs behind an API. Demonstrates strong end-to-end ownership of reliability and operations (schema validation, retries/fallbacks, latency/cost controls, monitoring for drift) and a disciplined approach to evaluation and regression testing. Experienced collaborating with non-technical reviewers to define success criteria and deliver interpretable outputs that get adopted.”

Sai Srujan Vemula

Screened

Mid-level Full-Stack Developer specializing in Java/Spring Boot and React on AWS

CT, USA3y exp

“Full-stack engineer with enterprise experience at Meta System and DXC, owning end-to-end delivery of a shipment visibility portal (React UI in Liferay DXP + Java/Spring Boot REST APIs) with Dockerized deployments and automated test coverage. Has hands-on AWS work across EC2/Lambda/S3 and multiple databases (DynamoDB, RDS, Neptune, DocumentDB), plus built a Python/Flask data migration platform with validation for correctness and repeatability.”

“Hands-on backend engineer with practical experience improving latency in Django-based API systems by fixing missing indexes and eliminating N+1 queries. Also built an AI scheduling system using FastAPI, a relational database, AI/ML workflows, and an operational reporting dashboard, with a clear bias toward correctness and maintainable architecture.”

“Backend engineer with fintech/AI startup experience who built an Azure serverless, event-driven pipeline for large-scale crypto sentiment analysis and semantic search (OCR/NLP to vector search) and integrated LLM + blockchain data for predictive insights. Demonstrated measurable impact (25% lower retrieval latency, 10% fewer data errors, 15% higher engagement) and has led safe microservices migrations with strong security and reliability practices.”

“Frontend engineer/product lead with experience building a Tableau-like data visualization dashboard at StradigiAI, including a scalable SQL-like query/filter approach for high-volume data. At LogMeIn/GoTo, migrated a TypeScript React product from Redux to React Query with shared state abstractions across web, Electron, and React Native, and helped leverage a design system to support a rapid company rebrand.”

“Built and productionized a clinical NLP + patient risk stratification platform at Dermanture, combining Spark/PySpark pipelines with BERT/BioBERT for entity extraction and text classification and downstream risk models in TensorFlow/scikit-learn. Experienced running regulated, auditable ML workflows with Airflow and AWS SageMaker, emphasizing data validation (Great Expectations), drift monitoring, and explainability (SHAP) to drive clinician trust and adoption.”

“Built and deployed a scalable, production-ready LLM knowledge assistant using a RAG architecture (LangChain + vector store/FAISS) to replace keyword search for internal documents. Demonstrates hands-on expertise in hallucination reduction and retrieval quality improvements through semantic chunking, similarity tuning, prompt design, and human-in-the-loop validation, plus strong stakeholder communication via demos and visual explanations.”

“Backend Python engineer who architected an event-driven order integration engine connecting EDI vendors to ERP/WMS/3PL systems, including a canonical order model and adapter framework to eliminate per-customer hardcoding. Has hands-on Kubernetes production experience (microservices, Celery workers, CronJobs, HPAs) and implemented GitOps/CI-CD using GitHub Actions, Docker, and ArgoCD, including moving deployments from on-prem to Azure.”

“Founding engineer with strong end-to-end product delivery across IoT + mobile + serverless cloud: built firmware for a Bluetooth-connected device (ESP32), a native Swift iOS app, and an AWS serverless backend (API Gateway/Lambda/SQS/SNS/DynamoDB) including payments via Stripe. Also shipped a separate startup product in 6 months: a React visual tool that generated HTTP/REST APIs with a Django backend, admin panel, and a code-generating CLI.”

“Full-stack product engineer who builds and owns production features across Next.js/React/TypeScript and Java Spring Boot, with strong Postgres data modeling and performance tuning. Has delivered measurable improvements (60%+ faster renders, 2s→100ms queries, 50% lower workflow latency) and built reliable Kafka-based workflows with robust observability (Prometheus/Grafana/Alertmanager) and high test coverage.”

“Engineering leader/player-coach who redesigned A/B testing and observability infrastructure for real-time audio/video features at 90M+ DAU scale, using Kafka-based ingestion and horizontally scalable aggregation for near real-time metrics. Managed 10–15 engineers, drove >20% infrastructure cost reduction without user-experience regressions, and led major peak-traffic incident response with lasting reliability improvements (load testing, capacity planning, alerting, pre-mortems).”

“Independent product builder with several live startups spanning transit, gaming, and SaaS/API tools. Notably built a Cyprus bus routes app before transit data was broadly available on Google Maps, and is currently maintaining products like CountriesDB and HolidayDB while pursuing SEO-led growth and validating ideas solo before expanding.”

Nicholas Shellabarger

Screened

Senior Software Engineer specializing in distributed FinTech systems

Denver, CO13y exp

“Founder of an early-stage startup who has already raised initial capital through a SAFE and built the platform with minimal funding. Demonstrates practical knowledge of VC and accelerator fundraising, a deliberate equity-preservation strategy, and is now seeking additional financing to create runway and scale the business.”

“Python/backend engineer with a data-systems focus who actively integrates AI tools like ChatGPT, Copilot, and multiple coding assistants into development workflows. Stands out for using AI pragmatically across coding, debugging, SQL, testing, and documentation while maintaining hands-on ownership of validation, implementation, and code quality.”

“Built a production LLM/RAG document extraction and game/quiz content workflow using LLaMA 2, LangChain/LangGraph, and FAISS, achieving ~94% accuracy and reducing turnaround from hours to minutes. Demonstrates strong applied MLOps/orchestration (CI/CD, MLflow, Databricks/PySpark), robust handling of noisy/variable document layouts (layout chunking + OCR fallbacks), and practical reliability practices (human-in-the-loop routing, drift monitoring, A/B testing).”

“Designed and deployed end-to-end LLM-powered AI agent systems to automate knowledge-intensive workflows across marketing/GTM, recruiting, and support. Brings production reliability rigor (evaluation pipelines, monitoring, testing, A/B experiments) plus orchestration expertise (Airflow, Prefect, custom Python) and a track record of translating non-technical stakeholder goals into working AI solutions (e.g., personalized customer engagement agent at Lara Design).”

“Internship experience at Paycom owning an end-to-end personalized course recommendation feature for an LMS, spanning SQL-based data pipelines, ML integration, and FastAPI REST services for real-time recommendations. Focused on production tradeoffs (latency vs. accuracy), scaling/SQL optimization, and post-launch iteration driven by engagement metrics.”

Moore Macauley

Screened

Intern Backend Developer specializing in AI, multi-agent systems, and computer vision

0y exp

“Backend-focused Python engineer who built core systems for an AI beauty-advice product: converting facial-recognition landmarks into usable facial measurements and dynamically shaping chatbot context for personalized guidance. Also worked on high-volume data ingestion at AINVESTgroup, improving agent context selection via a RAG database when upstream tags were unreliable, and has strong Git/GitOps + automated testing practices from rapid-deadline delivery environments.”