Vetted Cost Optimization Professionals

Zia Karim

Screened ReferencesStrong rec.

Executive AI and technology leader specializing in regulated enterprise and FinTech

Stamford, CT26y exp

“Founder with 10+ years in the startup ecosystem who is actively building an early-stage company and raising capital through partners in Singapore, Dubai, and LatAm. Deeply familiar with VC and accelerator models but intentionally pursuing a partner-led, B2B enterprise route to accelerate revenue, preserve control, and leverage direct customer and distribution access.”

“Apparel product developer/sourcing manager at Linkwear Limited who led high-risk, low-MOQ launches (down to 50 pcs/style) by reverse-engineering samples into tech packs, aggressively vetting/negotiating suppliers, and managing production through QC and shipping. Demonstrated trade-risk hedging (Section 301) via parallel sourcing and hands-on supplier recovery by traveling to Wuxi to resolve a mill bottleneck.”

“FinTech/AI engineer who has shipped an end-to-end discrepancy-detection product for financial managers using Next.js, FastAPI/GraphQL, Pinecone, and AWS (with dev/staging/prod, observability, A/B testing, and documentation). Also built an AI-native “AI Genesis” system with agentic cyclic workflows, routing, and tool use, and has experience modernizing legacy systems via the strangler fig pattern while coordinating with senior stakeholders on a 5G autonomous simulation platform.”

Priyanshu Maurya

Screened

Mid-level Data Scientist specializing in insurance, finance, and healthcare analytics

New York, NY3y exp

“Built and productionized LLM-driven sentiment scoring for earnings call transcripts at Goldman Sachs, replacing legacy NLP to deliver a cleaner trading signal while managing latency/cost via batching, caching, and distilled models. Also implemented an Airflow-orchestrated fraud modeling pipeline at MetLife with drift-based retraining and SageMaker deployment, and has a disciplined evaluation/rollout framework for reliable AI workflows.”

“Candidate brings an operator-to-founder profile with leadership experience in IT and Business Systems and a strong grasp of how ideas become venture-backable products. They speak fluently about startup evaluation criteria such as TAM, technical defensibility, speed to scale, and AI differentiation, and appear especially motivated by building solutions end-to-end in startup or venture studio environments.”

“Supply chain/sourcing professional focused on semiconductor tooling NPI ramp-ups, owning vendor selection through production and delivery. Demonstrates strong cost and trade-risk mitigation (e.g., avoided 25% Section 301 tariff via HTS/landed-cost analysis) and measurable supplier performance turnarounds (OTD improved to 95%) using SAP MRP, shortage analysis, and structured supplier governance.”

“Software engineer with strong compliance-domain experience who built a customer-facing compliance and reporting dashboard using React/TypeScript with Spring Boot microservices. Demonstrates mature production engineering practices—contract-first APIs, event-driven architecture (Kafka/RabbitMQ), caching (Redis), and robust CI/CD + observability (Prometheus/Grafana/ELK)—and also created a Python-based audit automation tool adopted into the standard release process.”

“Seasoned IT professional services and business transformation executive (currently global Head of Business Transformation Management at Fujitsu) who has built scalable sales-to-delivery operating models for growing boutique firms. Uses data-driven process/task mining plus stakeholder-led prioritization to deliver measurable outcomes, including a 30% manufacturing cycle-time improvement and 80+ SAP S/4HANA improvement recommendations implemented via a phased roadmap.”

“Experienced engineering leader from VC-backed companies who has represented the engineering organization directly to the board/investors, translating engineering and product status into concise, defensible updates. Familiar with investor expectations (high information density, rigorous Q&A) and motivated by joining early-stage efforts to drive outsized impact.”

silin liu

Screened

Mid-level AI/ML Engineer specializing in LLM agents, RAG, and enterprise ML systems

New York City, NY5y exp

“Built a production multi-agent recommendation/RAG system for internal data analysts to speed up weekly report creation by improving document discovery and automating report/SQL generation. Implemented LangGraph-based orchestration with deterministic agent routing, robust error handling (interrupt/resume), and metadata-driven semantic chunking for diverse PDF/document formats, plus monitoring for latency, throughput, and token/cost efficiency.”

“Founder/CTO-type startup leader who has built cloud-native data and AI platforms from scratch while owning both technical vision and product direction. Brings rare end-to-end startup experience spanning zero-to-one building, growth-stage execution, and fundraising from early stage through exit, with a strong ability to translate technical complexity into clear investor narratives.”

“Climate-tech founder with multiple EV infrastructure ventures, including Electriflow Finance and ChargeNet Stations. Has already raised $300k, signed a $1M term sheet, and piloted an AI-driven, app-less EV fleet charging platform with 36 fleets in Southern California.”