Vetted Data Ingestion Professionals

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.”

“Backend and distributed-systems engineer with experience integrating LLM capabilities into clinical data workflows at CVS. Stands out for treating AI as an engineering accelerator rather than a shortcut, with strong emphasis on validation, observability, Kafka-based async pipelines, and safe multi-agent orchestration for production systems.”

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.”

“Backend-heavy engineer with deep experience building enterprise and real-time systems across healthcare, operations monitoring, e-commerce, and 911 call center domains. He has led and personally coded greenfield and customer-facing platforms, including cloud/on-prem integrations, custom workflow tooling, and microservices architectures, while now independently upskilling into modern TypeScript/React-based frontend technologies.”

“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.”

“Built and deployed an AI agent to help patients navigate complex housing information by scraping and normalizing unstructured data across all 50 U.S. states, then layering a LangChain RAG system with MMR re-ranking to reduce hallucinations. Experienced in orchestrating multi-agent workflows (LangGraph/CrewAI) and production reliability practices (Pydantic-validated outputs, LLM-as-judge evals, tracing). Also delivered stakeholder-facing explainability via SHAP dashboards for a loan-approval predictive model at Welspot.”

“NLP/ML engineer with hands-on healthcare and support-ticket text experience, building clinical-note structuring and semantic linking systems using spaCy, BERT clinical embeddings, and FAISS. Emphasizes production-grade delivery (Airflow/Databricks, PySpark, Docker, AWS/FastAPI/Lambda) and rigorous validation via clinician-labeled datasets, retrieval metrics, and user feedback.”

“ML engineer/data scientist who deployed a production credit risk + insurance claims triage platform at Hartford Financial, combining XGBoost default prediction with BERT-based document classification. Demonstrated strong MLOps by cutting inference latency to sub-500ms and building drift monitoring plus automated retraining/deployment pipelines (MLflow, CloudWatch, GitHub Actions, SageMaker) with human-in-the-loop review and SHAP-based explainability for underwriting adoption.”

Aniruddha Chakravarty

Screened

Junior Software Engineer specializing in cloud infrastructure, observability, and full-stack systems

Remote2y exp

“Built and productionized a predictive maintenance system (predictEngineLife) estimating Remaining Useful Life for PW4000 turbofan engines from large-scale, noisy telemetry—emphasizing modular pipeline design, deterministic preprocessing, and strong observability/guardrails. Also has hands-on experience diagnosing multi-agent LLM customer-support workflows (schema/state issues, fallback paths, regression tests) and has led developer workshops (GDG Pune) while partnering with sales teams on technical discovery and POCs.”

“Full-stack AI engineer who has owned production deployments for both a voice journaling/emotional insights app and a RAG-based research assistant. Stands out for turning messy, failure-prone LLM and document pipelines into reliable user-facing systems through strong debugging, staged workflow design, and post-launch stabilization.”

“Data engineering/software development candidate who built a stock market pipeline and uses that project to demonstrate strong architectural thinking across Kafka, Spark, and Airflow. They stand out for a pragmatic approach to AI: using tools like Copilot, ChatGPT, LangChain, and AutoGen to accelerate development while maintaining human oversight, testing, and system-level decision making.”