Vetted AWS Professionals

Richard Ferguson

Screened

Executive technology leader specializing in government, cloud, and cybersecurity

Reno, NV31y exp

“Founder with a bootstrapped startup who navigated early hiring and scaling by leveraging contractor talent before converting key contributors to full-time employees. Active in Northern Nevada's startup ecosystem through Generator and StartupNV, and notably declined angel/VC offers to preserve equity because of strong conviction in a differentiated product and its market fit.”

“Built both traditional data infrastructure and LLM-powered product workflows, spanning a Python/SQL ETL deployment at Amazon and an adaptive learning system for their DataLingo platform. Particularly interesting for roles at the intersection of data engineering, applied AI, and customer-facing product delivery, with hands-on experience stabilizing probabilistic LLM systems in production.”

Chaithanya Konda

Screened

Mid-level Data Engineer specializing in multi-cloud analytics platforms

Waltham, MA6y exp

“Data engineer with hands-on GCP platform experience spanning BigQuery, Cloud SQL, Dataflow, and Cloud Composer, including both production operations and cloud migration work. They led a migration from legacy SQL Server/Oracle systems to a cloud-native BigQuery architecture and cite measurable impact: processing reduced from hours to minutes, query latency improved 60%+, and ingestion time improved 40%.”

“Software engineer with practical, day-to-day experience embedding AI into development workflows across coding, testing, code review, and AWS data pipelines. Uses tools like Claude, Cline, JUnit, Mockito, and Amazon Bedrock, and stands out for having a realistic, mature view of agent limitations, hallucinations, and the need for strong prompting and human validation.”

Robert Davis

Screened

Staff Software Engineer specializing in backend and distributed systems

Remote, US19y exp

“Backend engineer who co-launched SkyKick’s Office 365 SharePoint/Exchange backup product, built the MVP, and then architected and led its design for 9 years. Stands out for high-scale systems expertise, including an algorithmic redesign that cut cloud costs by an order of magnitude, plus earlier experience integrating speech recognition systems in noisy real-world customer environments.”

“Senior software engineer candidate who uses AI and multi-agent workflows thoughtfully to speed up development while preserving engineering rigor for production-critical decisions. Stands out for a clear risk-based framework: leveraging agents for boilerplate, refactoring, testing, and debugging, while relying on fundamentals, metrics, and human review for system design and scalability.”

Ethan Hu

Screened

Entry-level Software Engineer specializing in full-stack and embedded systems

Seattle, WA1y exp

“Backend/full-stack engineer on Qualtrics' Online Samples team working on audience sampling systems and APIs used by researchers. They have hands-on ownership of TypeScript/React/Express services, emphasize multi-layer testing and production observability with Splunk/VictorOps, and have built APIs for both internal and external developers.”

“Built and deployed PIKA, an internal multi-agent platform for FDA-regulated software development, owning it from concept through production. The candidate combines strong full-stack engineering with rigorous LLM orchestration, human-in-the-loop controls, and production eval systems, delivering measurable impact: 3x more design issues caught, ~90% fewer false positives, and ~40% efficiency gains on documentation-heavy workflows.”

“Software engineer with experience spanning early-stage startup architecture and large-scale Amazon product development. They’ve driven search and data-platform decisions in a 20-person startup, built full-stack React/Python tools that automate internal workflows, and shipped marketplace expansion and personalization features impacting 200k sellers and millions of end users.”

“Full-stack engineer with experience spanning a lean startup at AppLovin and production financial systems at Vanguard. They’ve built core user-facing platforms from scratch, including a B2B advertiser/publisher dashboard and a resilient client onboarding system using Spring Boot, NestJS, Postgres, Kafka, Redis, and AWS. Particularly strong in ambiguous environments where they work directly with stakeholders and own delivery end to end.”

“Built and owned an LLM support copilot at Stripe focused on improving agent ticket resolution. Designed the backend and ML system end to end, using RAG, Redis caching, hybrid vector search, and LoRA fine-tuning to achieve 40% lower latency and 22% higher response accuracy, with continuous quality monitoring via Ragas and related evaluation frameworks.”

Kevin West

Screened

Executive engineering leader specializing in AI, cloud architecture, and startup product delivery

Phoenix, AZ15y exp

“Founding/backend engineering leader who built an AI product for car enthusiasts, recruited and managed cross-functional/offshore teams, and helped drive an $8M Series A after scaling a viral launch of 40k+ users in a weekend. Also built a sophisticated human-in-the-loop AI brand platform with agent orchestration and led a major AWS Step Functions migration that reduced platform costs from $30k/month to roughly $900/month.”

“Built internal banking operations products spanning full-stack dashboards and AI-assisted workflow tools. Shipped a RAG-based assistant using PostgreSQL/Redis retrieval with OpenAI and Claude APIs, and used audit-log measurement plus evals/traces to drive a reported ~30% reduction in manual review time.”

Ali Vaghar

Screened

Director-level engineering leader specializing in MedTech software, systems, and DevSecOps

San Diego, CA28y exp

“Engineering leader in a stealth-mode MedTech startup who operates as a hands-on player-coach, owning technical direction for a distributed team building cloud-connected medical device and AI-enabled platforms. Stands out for combining safety-critical, regulated systems thinking with startup-speed execution, using automated verification and strong architectural modeling to keep defects near zero while accelerating delivery.”

Josh Rhoades

Screened

Executive Technology Leader (CTO) specializing in AI-enabled SaaS and regulated platforms

Los Angeles, CA30y exp

“Senior engineering leader with experience at Disney and BlackLine who drives business-aligned technology roadmaps through deep Product/Engineering partnership (two-in-a-box) and pragmatic prioritization frameworks. Has led major modernization initiatives—private-to-public cloud migration to GCP with multi-cloud evolution, data-layer performance improvements (Mongo/Redis, caching/query optimization), and tooling upgrades (VSS to GitHub)—while scaling teams with strong quality and accountability culture.”

Kevin Hoffman

Screened

Director-level product and engineering leader specializing in distributed systems and cloud platforms

Windsor, CT16y exp

“Former CTO and co-founder of Cosmonic who led technology vision, roadmap, and team building while also serving as the technical lead in investor and VC meetings. Has hands-on experience supporting seed and Series A rounds, plus strategic exposure to later-stage fundraising at Synadia, combining startup-building depth with a pragmatic view of risk and business viability.”

“Former multi-startup CTO with experience supporting successful capital raises and working directly with boards/investors. Known for implementing operational systems that reduce client escalations (e.g., a status/semaphore overview board) and for building UX-forward MVPs that evolve into automated platforms, including a loan underwriting system for a small US lender.”

“Built a production RAG-based "knowledge copilot" for support/ops using LangChain/LangGraph, implementing the full pipeline (ingestion, chunking, embeddings, vector DB retrieval/rerank, guarded generation with citations) and operating it as monitored microservices with CI/CD. Also designed an event-driven, streaming backend for real-time inventory ordering predictions that reduced stockouts by 25%, and has hands-on incident response experience stabilizing LLM API latency/5xx spikes using Datadog/APM and resilience patterns.”

Nicholas Zamboli

Screened

Senior Frontend Engineer specializing in cloud platforms and high-performance web apps

Johnston, RI11y exp

“Frontend engineer with hands-on experience building heavy visualization products, including a real-time warehouse robotics SPA and a Zillow-like real estate mapping application. Stands out for combining React/TypeScript UI engineering with Three.js and ESRI-based map rendering, plus practical performance optimization for large assets, live data, and layered geospatial interfaces.”