Vetted DevOps Professionals

Jacob Zimmerman

Screened

Director-level Engineering Platform leader specializing in cloud infrastructure, SRE, and SaaS compute

New York, NY19y exp

“Longtime early-stage startup operator (since 1998) now running a solo consulting practice focused on SaaS infrastructure and platform strategy. Former angel investor in a medical information SaaS company that went public, with a strong focus on making prototype/demo systems enterprise-ready through efficiency, reliability, and performance improvements, and a nuanced view of how AI/LLMs may change engineering team models.”

“Engineering leader/player-coach who built and validated a preference-based recommendation engine using clustering, including generating test data to evaluate how clusters evolve over time. Has SRE/DevOps experience and has owned production incidents end-to-end (logging-driven RCA and refactoring patterns that failed at large data scale). Emphasizes quality and platform stability via unit, integration, and load testing, and has managed performance via regular 1:1s and PIPs.”

“Early-stage investor with PropTech exposure who sources founders through conferences, VC networks, and thesis-driven outbound. Demonstrated ability to turn cold founder interactions into multi-month relationships by providing practical support on financial models and pitch decks, while applying a thoughtful lens on product-market fit and ICP in investment decisions.”

“Backend/platform engineer who has owned real-time reporting and streaming analytics systems end-to-end, combining FastAPI/Postgres APIs with Kafka consumers, Celery background jobs, and Redis caching. Strong DevOps/GitOps experience deploying Python/Node microservices to AWS EKS with Helm, ArgoCD/FluxCD, and CI pipelines, and has supported phased on-prem to AWS migrations using Terraform and traffic cutovers.”

“Software development manager who led development of the open-source AI agents framework Strands (for Amazon Bedrock), which launched mid-year and is used as a primary agent-development framework at Amazon and externally. Owned the Strands SDK end-to-end, drove adoption through stakeholder management and agile execution, and led a JavaScript-to-TypeScript migration to improve type safety and maintainability.”

“Engineering leader who drove Lightroom Mobile’s roadmap at Adobe by enforcing reuse of Photoshop imaging tech to deliver RAW, non-destructive mobile editing with full Creative Cloud compatibility. In startup environments, has repeatedly scaled and professionalized engineering orgs (career ladders, evaluation systems, delivery process) and led high-stakes cloud/platform transformations—migrating off Heroku and consolidating fragmented AWS/GCP usage into a single GCP platform—improving reliability, deploy speed, and cutting cloud costs by 20%+.”

SHIVA SANDY

Screened

Executive CTO/CIO specializing in FinTech, cloud transformation, and cybersecurity

Walnut Creek, CA27y exp

“Banking/credit-union technology executive (CTO/CTIO) who has led modernization and product delivery through major change, including a post-merger roadmap that helped grow a credit union from $600M to $1.5B in 3 years. Hands-on leader who drove cloud microservices/API architecture, introduced CI/CD, and accelerated releases from quarterly to weekly while scaling teams and operating effectively with distributed/remote orgs.”

“Chief AI Strategy at startup Zenera with 30 years in technology strategy/design, experienced in building business plans across startups and large enterprises (projects, new products, and M&A). Deeply familiar with enterprise AI go-to-market challenges (slow procurement/pilot cycles) and preparing for VC expectations (e.g., targeting a16z) by emphasizing unique tech and paying customers.”

“Co-founded Aethernet Inc., a B2B IoT connectivity platform with a usage-based revenue model and direct sales motion to device manufacturers. Bootstrapped with founder capital and strict cost control, with angel interest pending technical validation; developed the product through multi-year architecture experiments to deliver measurable latency/reliability/scalability/cost advantages versus DevOps-heavy incumbents like AWS IoT Core.”

“IBM Power/AIX infrastructure engineer who has owned large-scale Power9/AIX 7.x estates across primary/DR (VIOS/HMC/vHMC) and has deep hands-on experience with DLPAR, shared processor pool governance, and PowerHA recovery. Also brings modern DevOps/IaC capability—built Azure DevOps/GitHub CI/CD for Terraform + Kubernetes/Helm with strong security controls and resolved a production Terraform state-lock failure by redesigning backend locking and pipeline concurrency.”

“Candidate brings experience across both startups and big tech, along with direct exposure to pitching ideas to several VCs. They show a practical founder mindset centered on rapid prototyping, customer feedback, retention, and building AI/agent-driven products with strong product-market fit potential.”