Vetted Data Ingestion Professionals

Uriel Kluk

Screened ReferencesStrong rec.

Executive CTO specializing in AI, data platforms, and distributed systems

Chicago, IL20y exp

“Former CTO of Mesh Systems for 20 years, now going all-in on building a physical AI product company. He is simultaneously designing four products across eldercare, smart home monitoring, retail theft prevention, and AI-powered building access, with active industry partnerships (Advantech, Compulab) and a potential LATAM pharmacy pilot.”

“Built and productionized an internal GenAI chatbot that makes company policy/SOP knowledge instantly searchable, using a secure RAG architecture on AWS (Bedrock/Titan embeddings/OpenSearch Serverless, Textract/Lambda/S3 ingestion, Claude 3 Sonnet). Demonstrates strong MLOps/orchestration experience (Airflow, Step Functions with Lambda/Glue/SageMaker) and a rigorous reliability approach (RAGAS metrics, A/B testing, citation validation, monitoring), including collaboration with compliance stakeholders via review dashboards.”

Michael Forster

Screened ReferencesStrong rec.

Senior Data Engineer specializing in ETL/ELT pipelines and data integration platforms

New York, NY15y exp

“Data engineer/software engineer who led an end-to-end ETL/ELT pipeline at Pearson processing millions of rows of student data nightly, including client-side data prep/validation, SFTP/API ingestion, staging-based SQL validation/transforms, and production loading. Built reliability features like configurable per-client validation thresholds, detailed reporting, concurrency throttling via a custom queue, and multi-source merge/backfill logic to keep nightly loads running even when sources fail.”

“Built and shipped a production RAG system (“TROJAN KNOWLEDGE”) for answering questions over technical PDFs, using a 3-stage retrieval stack (BM25 + FAISS + cross-encoder) to lift F1 from 71% to 84%. Drove major performance gains with a 3-level cache (memory/Redis/disk) cutting latency from ~200ms to ~10ms, and added Prometheus/Grafana monitoring plus LangChain-based fallback logic to handle OpenAI rate limits under load.”

Sudheer koki

Screened ReferencesStrong rec.

Mid-level AI/ML Engineer specializing in predictive modeling, data pipelines, and RAG systems

Florida, USA5y exp

“Built and productionized an LLM-powered internal knowledge search system in a regulated environment, using embeddings/vector DB retrieval with strict grounding and confidence gating to reduce hallucinations. Reported ~45% accuracy improvement over keyword search and implemented end-to-end orchestration, monitoring, CI/CD, and incremental re-indexing to manage latency and data freshness while driving adoption with business stakeholders.”

“Built across cloud infrastructure, AI-powered product workflows, and backend data reliability in environments including Northeastern, Knead, and Grafx. Particularly compelling for roles needing someone who can both ship AWS-based systems end-to-end and debug messy production issues involving caching, APIs, and data pipelines.”

“Full-stack engineer with strong Next.js App Router/TypeScript experience who built production dataset search/filtering and data-heavy dashboards backed by Postgres. Demonstrates hands-on performance work across the stack (EXPLAIN ANALYZE, composite indexes, caching, React profiling/memoization) and has built durable, Temporal-like orchestrated data-processing workflows with idempotency and retry strategies in an early-stage startup environment (Gaia AI).”

“Backend/platform engineer who owned an end-to-end financial data ingestion and validation system (Python/Django/FastAPI, Postgres, AWS), including large-file performance tuning, auditability, and CI/CD. Strong Kubernetes/EKS + ArgoCD GitOps practitioner and has delivered both Kafka-based real-time transaction streaming and a legacy on-prem stack migration to AWS (ECS Fargate, RDS, S3, Secrets Manager) with controlled cutovers and data consistency validation.”

“AI/LLM engineer with healthcare domain experience who built a production clinical support “chart bot” for Molina, including PHI-safe ingestion of 200k+ PDF policies, vector retrieval, and a fine-tuned LLaMA served via vLLM on ECS Fargate. Demonstrated measurable performance wins (HNSW + namespace partitioning; 30% inference latency reduction) and a rigorous evaluation/monitoring approach, while partnering closely with nurses and operations teams to shape workflows and guardrails.”

Siva Pothuru

Screened

Mid-level AI/ML Engineer specializing in LLMs, MLOps, and cloud-native ML

San Antonio, TX5y exp

“LLM/agent engineer at USAA who built a production GPT-4o RAG conversational assistant for financial analysts, focused on regulatory interpretation and internal documentation search. Emphasizes compliance-grade reliability with strict grounding, safe fallbacks, and full auditability via MLflow/DVC plus human-in-the-loop review; reports ~45% reduction in ticket resolution time.”

“Software engineer (Yellow.ai) who built and productionized an AI-driven resume tailoring system using embeddings + Chroma RAG + QLoRA fine-tuning, deployed via Docker/Kubernetes with CI/CD on a CPU-only Oracle VM. Demonstrates strong reliability/evaluation rigor (custom hallucination/coverage/relevance metrics) and measurable business impact, including a 60% user satisfaction lift from improving chatbot intent accuracy with product and support teams.”

“Internship project at Builder Market: built an end-to-end production multimodal LLM application that estimates renovation/replacement costs from appliance photos (CLIP embeddings) or text descriptions, combining fine-tuning with agentic RAG. Focused heavily on real-world performance constraints—latency and cost—using parallel agent workflows, model routing to smaller/open-source models, re-ranking, and retrieval chunking, and collaborated closely with CEO/co-founders to deliver the solution.”

“Built and deployed a real-time hospital readmission risk prediction system at NYU Langone Health, combining structured EHR data with BERT-based NLP on clinical notes and serving predictions to clinicians via Azure ML and FHIR APIs. Emphasizes production reliability and clinical trust through SHAP-based explainability and robust healthcare data preprocessing, and reports a 22% reduction in 30-day readmissions.”