Vetted CI/CD Professionals

Thazim Banu Shaffee

Screened ReferencesStrong rec.

Engineering Manager specializing in payments, risk, and high-scale distributed systems

San Jose, CA14y exp

“Engineering leader/player-coach on a risk core transaction platform (payments/branded checkout) who led major migrations from a monolithic stack to microservices, including API contract redesign and performance improvements (reported ~500ms latency reduction). Experienced running high-stakes production incidents (upgrade-related outage/degradation) end-to-end with RCA and rollout-process changes, and has accelerated delivery via documentation/tooling (audit sign-off cycle reduced from ~3 sprints to ~1).”

Jared Alessandroni

Screened ReferencesStrong rec.

Executive CTO specializing in AI, cloud platforms, and scaling SaaS products

21y exp

“NYC-based startup founder/CTO who sold products to Omnicom and Sprinklr, then built an AI-powered cultural insights engine inside Omnicom using AWS Lambda + ML to process ~1M items/day and reached ~$1MM ARR in year one. Former senior leader at Sprinklr managing 200+ people globally, delivering enterprise martech solutions with SLAs and high-reliability social data pipelines (Twitter firehose).”

Jack Bridges

Screened ReferencesModerate rec.

Senior Software Engineer specializing in game platforms and player-facing systems

Brier, WA27y exp

“Senior engineer with a rare mix of game-platform and mobile content-delivery experience: helped ship the Xbox 360 Party system and later architected the custom multi-catalog asset pipeline behind Netflix Stories. Particularly compelling for teams needing someone who can design scalable, low-memory, high-stability systems for live content across many titles and external partners.”

“McKinsey practitioner who built and deployed production LLM systems for consultants/clients, including a Power BI-integrated multi-agent chatbot (RAG + text-to-SQL + formatting) with custom Python orchestration, verification loops, and a 100+ case eval set achieving ~95% consistency. Also delivered a taxonomy-mapper agent that standardized inconsistent labeling for C-suite stakeholders, cutting a process from >2 weeks to <30 minutes through demos and business-focused communication.”

“Project lead who partners with PM and customers to gather requirements, adjust project plans, and deliver new functionality that drives customer satisfaction and revenue. Has experience building features end-to-end and presenting successful technical demos to engineering and management audiences; no stated experience with LLM/agentic systems.”

“Built and productionized a real-time enterprise RAG pipeline to improve factual accuracy and reduce LLM hallucinations by grounding responses in constantly changing internal knowledge bases (policies, manuals, FAQs). Experienced in orchestrating end-to-end ML workflows (Airflow/Kubernetes), handling messy multi-format data with schema enforcement (Pydantic/Hydra), and maintaining freshness via streaming incremental embeddings plus batch refresh. Also delivers applied ML solutions with non-technical teams (marketing/CRM) for segmentation and personalized engagement.”

“Built and shipped an end-to-end LLM agent during an AT&T internship to automate network troubleshooting, with production-style reliability safeguards (timeouts/retries/fallbacks) and structured, state-machine orchestration; project won 3rd place in AT&T’s nationwide intern innovation challenge and was demoed to leadership. Also handled messy multi-partner data at Tencent by implementing schema validation/normalization, confidence-threshold fallbacks, and idempotent Python/ORM-based pipelines.”

“Unity/C# gameplay engineer from Rec Room who owned end-to-end systems spanning downloadable avatar content delivery (Addressables + auth/CDN), build automation/CI for asset bundles, and creator tooling (Avatar Studio). Also implemented AI-driven localization and generative mesh features, and has deep multiplayer experience with Photon and Photon Quantum across VR (Meta Quest) and mobile platforms, citing a 20% retention lift from faster content delivery and customization.”

“Built a production LLM-powered data ingestion workflow at Provi, an online alcohol marketplace, to clean and match millions of distributor inventory items against a product catalog. Their experience is strongest in applying LLMs to real-world, large-scale data operations with AWS Glue, S3, batching, API integration, human review, and drift detection.”

“Backend/data engineer with experience at AWS and Intuit building and operating production serverless systems and data pipelines. Delivered an internal AWS TV video-processing platform using Step Functions/Lambda/S3/DynamoDB with strong reliability and cost controls, and built Glue-based ETL for compliance/risk events (Kafka to partitioned Parquet). Also modernized legacy compliance systems into Java/Node event-driven services and has demonstrated measurable SQL tuning impact (200s to 20s).”

“Serverless-focused backend/data engineer who has delivered production Python services on AWS (FastAPI on Lambda/API Gateway) plus Glue-based ETL pipelines from S3 to relational databases. Strong in operational reliability (timeouts, retries, monitoring/alerts) and modernization work, including parallel-run parity validation for migrating legacy batch logic to Python services. Demonstrated measurable SQL tuning impact (15 min to under 3 min).”

“Engineering leader who built and scaled a distributed team (Serbia + US) to deliver an internal multi-tenant Kubernetes-based PaaS, moving a large org from manual ops-driven deployments to automated CI/CD with >99.97% uptime and 100% service adoption. Known for culture change (blameless post-mortems, clear intake via ticketing) and security-first platform practices (tenant isolation, Falco) supporting SOC2 compliance; also operates at exec level with stakeholder communication and fundraising.”

“Platform/backend engineer focused on Kubernetes at scale: built a Java control-plane service for multi-region cluster provisioning/monitoring/upgrades using Kafka-driven async workers, and solved peak-load provisioning failures by eliminating blocking I/O and dynamically scaling consumers. Also shipped an LLM-assisted Kubernetes troubleshooting/remediation feature that pulls Prometheus logs/metrics into prompts and uses guardrails (confidence thresholds + human-in-the-loop) to prevent risky actions.”

“CTO-focused candidate with experience at foundations evaluating startups, including reviewing technical architectures and coaching teams to refine ideas for better platform fit and synergies. Prioritizes company culture and integrity when choosing leadership roles.”

Akshitha Singireddy

Screened

Junior Software Engineer specializing in data engineering and computer vision

Bellevue, WA1y exp

“Former Amazon intern who owned an end-to-end computer vision system to detect package anomalies in fulfillment centers, from data collection/labeling to production deployment on AWS (EC2/S3) with a Streamlit live-monitoring dashboard. Also has ML-in-production experience deploying and updating a recommendation model on Kubernetes (Minikube) with CI/CD via GitHub Actions, plus prior SDE experience with Jenkins-based pipelines and on-prem to AWS migration work using Glue.”

Jingfei Xu

Screened

Intern/Junior Software Engineer specializing in AI/ML and cloud-based systems

Mountain View, CA0y exp

“Embedded/robotics software engineer with Hyundai Motors experience who owned an AI-driven perception validation pipeline using a Transformer-based approach to generate stable synthetic in-cabin audio for autonomy/ASR testing, cutting downstream testing time by 50%+. Has hands-on ROS integration (IMU sensor streaming, inference, control nodes), MQTT-based distributed messaging, and cloud/container deployment experience (Docker, Node/Express, AWS, CI/CD).”

“Four-time founder with hands-on experience inside angel- and venture-backed executive teams, plus accelerator mentorship experience. Brings a practical, customer-validation-driven approach to company building, with strong insight into early-stage team dynamics and investor ecosystems.”

“Robotics/ML engineer with internship experience at Valeo building a deep-learning prototype to replace parts of a legacy SLAM backend for autonomous parking, focused on making models run reliably in real time on embedded hardware (quantization/distillation + TensorRT). Also brings strong MLOps/deployment experience (Docker, Kubernetes on AWS EKS, CI via GitHub Actions) and has supported patent filing by explaining the technical approach to legal stakeholders.”

“Meta engineer who improved a critical revenue estimation dataset pipeline that was arriving ~6 days late—diagnosed via raw logs/lineage, redesigned legacy scans to only process the needed window, and shipped validation plus freshness/lag dashboards. Delivered ~50% latency reduction (to ~3 days) and regained adoption by running old/new pipelines in parallel with gated cutover and evidence-based customer communication. Applies incident-response rigor to real-time LLM/agentic workflow debugging and regularly runs developer demos/workshops.”

“Internship at BlueFoxLabs building and deploying an AI/ML RAG system for a biopharma client on top of LibreChat, including an AWS Textract ingestion pipeline and PGVector retrieval deployed to AWS EKS. Demonstrated production-minded scalability work by moving from a vertically scaled EC2 setup to a horizontally scaling Kubernetes/EKS deployment, using CI/CD to safely incorporate requirement changes like tabular document data.”

“Backend engineer who scaled a food delivery platform by migrating from a single-service architecture to Spring Cloud microservices with an API gateway and Kafka-based event-driven order pipeline. Reported outcomes include ~50% latency reduction, stable ~2K RPS throughput, and 99.8% uptime, with strong emphasis on safe migrations (dual writes, canaries, schema versioning) and security (JWT/RBAC/Postgres RLS).”

“QA professional with experience at Google and Meta, focused on end-to-end functional/regression testing, disciplined bug reporting (including ADB logs), and release readiness via staging build promotion and gating on critical/high-priority issues. Emphasizes PRD-driven test planning, edge-case coverage (e.g., low connectivity/low battery), and thorough verification across build versions.”

Ravikanth Kasamsetty

Screened

Executive AI/ML Engineering Leader specializing in cloud-native SaaS and GenAI platforms

23y exp

“Engineering leader who modernized and unified a fragmented product suite at Milestone via a multi-year cloud-native roadmap, delivering an MVP in three quarters and boosting team velocity by 40% through cross-functional squads. At Prometheum, led a trust-building hybrid architecture (AWS control plane + customer-hosted data plane) using Kubernetes to ensure sensitive enterprise data never left customer networks while remaining cloud-agnostic across providers.”