Vetted Front-End Development Professionals

“Entrepreneurial builder and former founding CTO of a Y Combinator startup that was acquired. Now in the planning stage for a new venture (considering edtech, media creation, and food/"intelligent servicing"), emphasizing early design partners, rapid testing, and iteration to validate ideas.”

Pavithra Kollu

Screened

Mid-level Machine Learning Engineer specializing in LLMs, RAG, and search systems

San Francisco, CA5y exp

“Backend/ML infrastructure engineer with experience at Perplexity and Meta building production evaluation, monitoring, and retrieval systems for AI search, autonomous agents, and LLM-powered workflows. Particularly strong in turning messy manual quality-review processes into reusable Python/FastAPI automation with measurable impact, including major gains in search relevance, latency, and grounded answer quality.”

Brett Potter

Screened

Director-level Blockchain Engineer specializing in smart contracts and Web3 infrastructure

Miami, FL15y exp

“Technical leader with startup and venture experience who recently had a modest exit from a crypto protocol called Buck. Previously served as Technology Director at Launch Code Capital and has worked across multiple startups, bringing both operator and VC-side perspective.”

“Hands-on engineering manager on a large web product who built an AI-driven navigation search and led a major post-acquisition unification effort across 3 companies and 5–7 teams, including front-end architecture for 60+ developers. Also owns a high-scale BFF (800 endpoints) and drove a deep reliability fix involving Kubernetes/Envoy/Redis session bloat, adding monitoring and preventative controls.”

Jourdan Smith

Screened

Executive UX design and research leader specializing in AI, voice, and digital commerce

Chicago, IL15y exp

“Product and UX leader with high-profile experience across Amazon Prime Wardrobe, Amazon Fashion, and Alexa smart home, plus consulting work for large enterprises like Hy-Vee. Particularly compelling for roles at the intersection of product, design, and AI: they’ve built zero-to-one consumer experiences, applied ML to reduce fashion returns, and led scalable UX systems across complex ecosystems while navigating heavyweight enterprise politics.”

Mike Henniger

Screened ReferencesStrong rec.

Staff Software Engineer specializing in scalable backend and full-stack web systems

Burlingame, CA32y exp

“Frontend-leaning full-stack product engineer with IMVU experience who designed both user-facing flows and the production telemetry behind them. Most notably, they built a JavaScript crash detection system using signature-based aggregation and Redis that helped reduce crash volume from millions per day to tens of thousands, and they pair that reliability mindset with reusable UI architecture and onboarding design for consumer social products.”

“Backend/AI engineer who has built a rule-service platform on AWS and evolved it into an agentic RAG system using LangChain, ReAct, tool calling, and LLM-as-judge review. Notable for combining heavy AI-assisted development with production safeguards like manual CR, CloudWatch monitoring, fallback strategies, benchmark testing, and user-feedback-driven model improvement.”

Rom Manzano

Screened

Executive technical founder and full-stack engineer specializing in AI, SaaS, and FinTech

New York, NY15y exp

“Engineer coming out of a venture studio as it winds down, now seeking another zero-to-one environment with strong studio support and go-to-market playbooks. They show a thoughtful founder mindset centered on rapid shipping, design-partner validation, lean execution, and testing whether users will actually pay for a workflow-specific solution.”

“Full-stack engineer at Vanguard who architected and shipped a production AI onboarding chatbot using React, Python, LangChain, RAG, and AWS Bedrock, reaching 50,000+ prospects in two months and reducing drop-off by 26%. Particularly compelling for teams building regulated AI products: they combine hands-on full-stack delivery with guardrails, observability, and experimentation, and also build consumer AI products on the side in endurance coaching.”

“MBA-trained operator-investor who interned in venture capital at Marquee Ventures while also founding GoodBites Brisket Jerky. Brings a rare combination of startup evaluation experience and true zero-to-one execution, having built outbound sales, sourced manufacturers, created a website with Claude Code, and run day-to-day operations for a specialty food brand.”