Vetted Elasticsearch Professionals

Thazim Banu Shaffee

Screened ReferencesStrong rec.

Engineering Manager specializing in payments, risk, and high-scale distributed systems

San Jose, CA14y exp

“Engineering leader/player-coach on a risk core transaction platform (payments/branded checkout) who led major migrations from a monolithic stack to microservices, including API contract redesign and performance improvements (reported ~500ms latency reduction). Experienced running high-stakes production incidents (upgrade-related outage/degradation) end-to-end with RCA and rollout-process changes, and has accelerated delivery via documentation/tooling (audit sign-off cycle reduced from ~3 sprints to ~1).”

“Engineering leader with hands-on product and platform experience spanning AI-powered web forms, multi-region Azure/OpenAI architecture, and full-stack team scaling. They also remain close to production systems, citing a concrete debugging example involving iOS WebView local storage behavior causing token loss in embedded mobile web forms.”

“Backend engineer who scaled a food delivery platform by migrating from a single-service architecture to Spring Cloud microservices with an API gateway and Kafka-based event-driven order pipeline. Reported outcomes include ~50% latency reduction, stable ~2K RPS throughput, and 99.8% uptime, with strong emphasis on safe migrations (dual writes, canaries, schema versioning) and security (JWT/RBAC/Postgres RLS).”

Sara Rubacha

Screened

Engineering Manager specializing in databases and distributed systems

Weston, FL21y exp

“Aspiring founder exploring an AI automation startup focused on automating processes involved in building companies. Not yet developed specific use cases or raised capital, but describes a clear plan to validate ideas through use-case research, building a pilot, and testing with early customers; not familiar with the VC/accelerator landscape yet.”

George Liu

Screened

Intern Software Engineer specializing in full-stack, backend, and AI agent systems

Fremont, CA1y exp

“Backend engineer with Tesla experience who redesigned vehicle registration into a step-based, region-configured workflow across 4–5 microservices, enabling partial saves and reducing customer drop-off. Has hands-on experience scaling and securing Python/FastAPI APIs (OAuth2/JWT, CORS), migrating cold data from MySQL to MongoDB via Kubernetes CronJobs, and implementing RBAC/RLS with Supabase + Postgres.”

Ahmed Sadaqat

Screened

Senior Machine Learning Engineer specializing in production ML and predictive analytics

Los Angeles, CA7y exp

“ML/AI engineering leader who has owned end-to-end production systems from experimentation through deployment, monitoring, and iteration at meaningful scale. They describe running a 1M+ records/day prediction platform with 99.9% availability, shipping a RAG-based conversational AI feature for 50,000 active users, and consistently improving precision, latency, reliability, and cost with measurable business impact.”

Sona Petrosyan

Screened

Director-level Engineering Leader specializing in Identity & Access Management

San Ramon, CA20y exp

“Senior engineering leader with 20+ years of experience spanning hands-on engineering and 7+ years of management across startups and enterprise, including Salesforce/MuleSoft, Airbnb, and Insightly. Particularly strong in platform security and IAM, with a track record of leading high-scale foundational services, simplifying complex cross-platform trust models, and driving security-critical migrations across dozens of teams.”

“Fitbit engineer who has taken multiple projects from concept to release, including architecting a new warranty-evaluation system that achieved 100% accuracy and saved the company $6M. Interested in exploring startup ideas and emphasizes mission alignment and building strong cross-functional teams.”

“Backend/data engineer with hands-on production experience across GCP (FastAPI microservices on Kubernetes) and AWS (Lambda, ECS Fargate, Glue). Has modernized legacy SAS batch systems into Python services with parallel-run parity validation, and has strong operational rigor in ETL reliability/monitoring plus proven SQL tuning impact (25s to <300ms, ~60% CPU reduction).”

“Backend/platform engineer with experience at Microsoft, Uber, and Gusto building production AI-agent automation systems in Python (AutoGen) and cloud-native microservices on Kubernetes across AWS/Azure. Has delivered zero-downtime migrations and high-throughput real-time streaming pipelines (Kafka/WebSockets/Redis), and is strong in GitOps/ArgoCD-driven CI/CD with reliable rollouts and rapid rollback.”

Armenak Bdoian

Screened

Senior Product Leader specializing in AI-enabled marketplaces and e-commerce

Seattle, WA18y exp

“Product leader with experience spanning Amazon Prime and List.am, where they built a product org from scratch and drove a marketplace transformation for 3M users. Particularly strong in zero-to-one and rebuild work across search, ads, AI moderation, and complex cross-functional alignment, with measurable impact on engagement, revenue, and operational efficiency.”

“Backend/AI engineer who built a production GPU-backed real-time inference API at Nvidia and debugged burst-induced tail latency, cutting P95 by ~29% through dynamic batching and backpressure. Also shipped an end-to-end RAG + agentic operational diagnostics assistant with strict tool controls, evidence citation, confidence gating, and strong production guardrails, plus demonstrated hands-on Postgres optimization (900ms to 40–60ms).”

“Engineer with deep hands-on experience building Square's billing and payments platform in a startup-like environment inside a larger company. They drove a high-stakes PostgreSQL migration, built merchant-facing full-stack features across React/TypeScript, Go, and Python, and designed for PCI-compliant, high-throughput financial workflows with strong observability and production rigor.”