Vetted Distributed Systems Professionals

Prayasha Chaudhary

Screened ReferencesModerate rec.

Senior Engineering Leader specializing in cloud architecture and AI-powered data platforms

Remote5y exp

“Hands-on startup operator with experience across three startups, including companies built from inception and a PEAK6-backed environment. Particularly compelling for early-stage roles: they have rebuilt technical foundations, scaled platforms during growth, and pair strong product ownership with a practical, user-validation-first approach to building scalable systems.”

“Full-stack engineer with about 3 years of experience who is deeply hands-on with AI-assisted development and agentic systems. Built TubeAgent using LangChain, Ollama, FAISS, and Llama 3, and has demonstrated measurable impact by cutting review time by 90% and reducing deployment time from 30 minutes to under 5 minutes at NC State. Combines practical experimentation with strong architectural thinking around resilient, composable AI systems.”

“Built and owned core systems for VISTA, a VR drone training simulator in Unity/C#, including modular training scenarios, drone physics, restricted airspace logic, and dynamic weather-aware gameplay. Stands out for combining VR performance discipline on Meta Quest with realistic-yet-trainable flight controls and close collaboration with faculty SMEs to align the simulation with real training workflows.”

Bill Cheng

Screened ReferencesStrong rec.

Director-level Engineering Leader specializing in SaaS platforms and AI systems

Remote, USA26y exp

“Entrepreneurial candidate building an LLC focused on applying AI to improve call center customer service, with an early go-to-market focus on local government call centers. They are already in discussions with a government prospect and have a clear thesis around solving high turnover and low knowledge retention through AI-assisted training and support systems.”

“Research-focused software engineer who builds performance-critical Python/C++ systems emphasizing correctness, state-transition precision, and distributed coordination. Created an automated simulation-based testing/validation framework for quantum programs that caught subtle logic/type errors early, reduced debugging time, and improved developer confidence through strong observability and scalable test generation.”

“Backend-focused JavaScript/Node.js engineer with e-commerce domain depth from Decathlon, working on foundational microservices for order management, inventory, and fulfillment integrations. Led an infrastructure redesign and shipped a Shopify-based persistent cart experience, diagnosing early production issues via monitoring/log analysis and improving reliability through stronger session persistence and fault-tolerant architecture.”

“Backend engineer/technical lead with experience building and operating real-time blockchain analytics systems at Merkle Science. Owned high-traffic Django/DRF services and Kafka streaming pipelines processing millions of events daily, with deep focus on performance (N+1 fixes, indexing, caching) and reliability (DLQs, retries, monitoring). Also led containerization and Kubernetes/GitOps-style CI/CD on Google Cloud, including a migration off Google App Engine to reduce cost and improve scalability.”

“Backend/platform engineer who owns policy-lifecycle workflow microservices built in Python/FastAPI with async + DDD, Kafka event processing, SQLAlchemy, JWT/RBAC, and Redis caching (cut DB load ~40%). Experienced deploying Java and Python microservices to Kubernetes with Helm and GitOps (ArgoCD) plus Jenkins/GitHub Actions pipelines to AWS/ECR, and has supported phased on-prem-to-cloud migrations with dependency mapping and data consistency strategies.”

“Built a secure, on-prem/private GPT assistant to replace manual SharePoint-style search across thousands of policies/SOPs/engineering docs, using a production RAG stack (LangChain/LangGraph, FAISS/Chroma, PyMuPDF+OCR, vLLM). Implemented layout-aware ingestion (including table-to-JSON) and a multi-agent retrieval/generation/verification workflow with strong observability and compliance guardrails, delivering ~70% reduction in search time.”

“Built and deployed an end-to-end product that brings a research-paper approach into production for large-scale time-series clustering, with attention to partitioning, latency, and scalability. Also designed a Python-based backend validation service (comparing outputs to database ground truths) and handled production reliability issues by reproducing dataset-specific crashes and hardening corner-case behavior with client-friendly errors.”

“Full-stack engineer who built a cloud storage app feature (file upload/management) with Next.js App Router + TypeScript and owned post-launch improvements. Also has internship experience building a geospatial AI chatbot: designed Postgres/PostGIS data models and optimized spatial queries, and implemented an LLM workflow orchestrated with LangChain/LangGraph plus a RAG pipeline grounded in OpenStreetMap data to reduce hallucinations.”

“Data/analytics engineer who owned Angi’s service-request funnel event pipeline end-to-end, routing events server-side to bypass ad blockers and recovering ~15% lost tracking at millions of events/day. Built Snowflake/dbt reporting tables powering Looker dashboards, with strong emphasis on validation, monitoring/alerting, and safe schema evolution. Also shipped a reusable flow state management backend service with TTL storage, CI/CD, and developer-friendly APIs.”

“Data engineer with healthcare domain experience who has owned end-to-end pipelines and APIs at UnitedHealth Group, processing ~8M records per batch. Strong focus on data quality (multi-layer validation), reliability (monitoring/logging, retries/idempotency), and performance (Spark/SQL tuning, caching), with experience standing up early-stage systems using Python, Docker, and CI/CD.”

Apurva Banka

Screened

Mid-level Full-Stack & AI Engineer specializing in cloud, data platforms, and LLM automation

Houston, TX5y exp

“Software engineer/product builder who has owned an agentic affiliate lead-gen platform end-to-end (Django + React/TypeScript) and deployed it on Kubernetes in anticipation of 10x user growth from ~5K DAUs. Also has healthcare claims microservices experience using Kafka, including hands-on performance tuning to address consumer lag and broker pressure, and built an internal downtime alerting tool adopted across the organization.”

Madhu Sriram Sengottu Velan

Screened

Entry-Level Software Engineer specializing in backend systems and distributed services

Chennai, IN2y exp

“Backend/AI engineer from an early-stage Japan-based startup (WorkAI) who built a multi-tenant RAG system integrating Notion/Slack/Google Drive with Pinecone and OpenAI, including a chatbot retrieval workflow. Experienced in production reliability (rate limits, retries, verification layers), strong Python/FastAPI engineering practices, and PostgreSQL performance optimization; currently based in India and needs sponsorship.”

Venkat Palaparthi

Screened

Senior Software Engineer specializing in cloud-native microservices and secure enterprise platforms

Dallas, TX6y exp

“Full-stack engineer with strong production ownership in banking/identity & entitlements systems, building Spring Boot + Postgres/Redis services and React dashboards, then deploying on AWS EKS with Jenkins CI/CD. Demonstrated impact through reduced authorization latency and fewer access-related support tickets, plus strong observability and reliability practices (CloudWatch, tracing, autoscaling, Kafka pipelines with DLQs and reconciliation).”

sudha kumari

Screened

Senior Full-Stack Product Engineer specializing in Next.js, TypeScript, and distributed systems

Frisco, Texas6y exp

“Full-stack engineer who built and shipped an analytics dashboard for search visibility using Next.js App Router/TypeScript with a server-components-first data strategy and server actions for interactivity. Designed and optimized the underlying Postgres analytics model and queries at scale, and implemented a durable Temporal-based indexing workflow with retries and idempotency—plus delivered a major frontend performance jump (Lighthouse low 70s to mid-90s).”

“Product-minded full-stack engineer focused on internal operations tooling, with hands-on ownership across React/TypeScript, serverless APIs, and Postgres. They combine UX simplification with deep performance and reliability work, citing a transaction-exception workflow redesign that cut task completion time by roughly 25%, and they’ve also built multi-tenant configurable systems with strong guardrails.”

“AI/ML engineer at MRI Software focused on taking LLM and RAG systems from prototype to reliable production. Notable work includes an AI automation system for migrating 1200+ legacy pages with 75-80% manual effort reduction, plus enterprise document-querying and reusable Python LLM infrastructure that cut lookup time by 70% and improved team velocity by 30-40%.”

Apoorv Bankey

Screened

Mid-level Backend Engineer specializing in distributed systems and FinTech

New York City, NY6y exp

“Engineer who uses AI and multi-agent workflows as a force multiplier while keeping architecture, security, scalability, and production quality under human control. Shared a concrete example of accelerating a backend-heavy SaaS email ingestion platform with authentication, role-based APIs, database models, and deployment setup using agent-style development and review.”

“Built an itinerary-planning startup MVP (LessGO) using React/TypeScript and a Node/Express backend integrating Google Maps and Gemini AI. Notably optimized Gemini latency from ~40 seconds to ~3 seconds through frontend caching, debugging, and model selection, and has TA experience supporting others with deployments and database connectivity.”

“Early-career engineer who built and launched a zero-to-one AI-driven approval workflow at SDSU that is used daily by roughly 2,000 university users. They owned the system end-to-end—from FastAPI/PostgreSQL backend to React UI—and showed strong judgment around LLM reliability, using a two-step pipeline, validation checks, and human-review fallbacks to cut manual processing time by about 80%.”

Pallavi Hogalagere Anandareddy

Screened

Mid Software Engineer specializing in backend systems and FinTech

Tampa, FL4y exp

“Backend/full-stack engineer with experience spanning banking implementations at FIS and hands-on product building in React, TypeScript, Node.js, SQL, and Python. Stands out for owning six bank go-lives end-to-end, building an AI resume evaluator, and proactively automating manual operations workflows to reduce errors and improve consistency.”

“Full-stack and AI product engineer who has shipped both operational SaaS and LLM-powered research tools to production. Built a dispatch optimization system at Quickflora that cut manual effort by ~50%, and also developed grounded RAG and agentic systems using tools like LlamaIndex, Gemini, pgvector, and FastAPI with a strong emphasis on citations, reliability, and practical user workflows.”