Vetted Helm Professionals

“Founding AI engineer at an AI SaaS startup who built the full GTM knowledge and retrieval stack for non-technical teams, driving 60% less manual effort and 25% faster deployments. Also brings enterprise B2B SaaS integration experience from Wipro, including external API/documentation work for large-scale partner ecosystems.”

Likitha Kukunarapu

Screened References

Mid-level Applied AI Engineer specializing in data engineering and healthcare AI

Remote, USA3y exp

“Built production LLM agents spanning document Q&A, financial insight generation, and ERP-like operational data workflows, with a strong focus on reliability, grounding, and evaluation. Stands out for translating LLM systems into measurable business outcomes, including 70%–80% support workload reduction and a fallback-rate improvement from 18% to 8% through targeted RAG iteration.”

“Backend/platform engineer who has owned a real-time data ingestion/processing/reporting API built with FastAPI, Redis, and Celery, including performance tuning via query/index optimization, caching, and async workers. Strong Kubernetes + CI/CD + GitOps (ArgoCD) experience, plus hands-on monitoring/logging (Prometheus/Grafana/ELK) and a Kafka/Spark real-time streaming project from their master’s program.”

“Infrastructure/platform engineer with end-to-end ownership across Kubernetes and VMware/vSphere, emphasizing automation (Terraform/Ansible), phased upgrades, and reliability validation via testing/failover/monitoring. Has operated hybrid on-prem VMware to AWS environments with VPN/Direct Connect, BGP routing, and security controls, including resolving production connectivity instability and adding redundancy.”

Phanindra Satya Tharun Gunturi

Screened

Mid-level DevOps/SRE Engineer specializing in cloud CI/CD, IaC, and Kubernetes

Nashville, TN5y exp

“Infrastructure engineer with deep production IBM Power/AIX experience (AIX 7.2/7.3, HMC, dual VIOS, PowerHA) supporting ~25–30 LPARs and handling live DLPAR tuning, HA failovers, and Power7→Power9 migrations. Also builds modern cloud delivery platforms—Azure DevOps CI/CD deploying Dockerized microservices to Kubernetes with Terraform-managed AWS infrastructure, strong controls around secrets, drift, and safe rollouts.”

“Infrastructure security/DevSecOps engineer who led security and automation patterns during a large Azure migration (30+ legacy apps, wave-based execution), enforcing zero-trust controls by baking CrowdStrike/Illumio into golden images and adding CI/CD security gates. Experienced integrating GitLab runners and Terraform agents as containerized services with strong secrets management (Azure Key Vault) and disciplined image/versioning practices, and has hands-on troubleshooting of ACI runtime constraints under load.”

Job DelToro

Screened

Senior Full-Stack Engineer specializing in SaaS, cloud infrastructure, and video platforms

Guadalajara, México8y exp

“Full-stack engineer working at the intersection of product engineering and applied AI, with hands-on experience shipping real-time user features, MCP server integrations, and LLM-powered support systems. Stands out for combining TypeScript-heavy full-stack execution with production AI practices like retrieval architecture, confidence-based routing, observability, and evals, while driving measurable outcomes such as a 25% DAU lift and reduced support load.”

“Backend-focused Python engineer who has owned production FastAPI services deployed on Kubernetes, including CI/CD (GitLab CI to ECR) and GitOps delivery via ArgoCD/Helm. Has hands-on experience with complex reliability and infrastructure work—solving data inconsistency with validation/partial-data paths, fixing K8s liveness issues via lazy loading, and supporting a phased cloud-to-on-prem migration with dual-writes and monitoring. Also built Kafka-based real-time ingestion consumers handling bursty, high-throughput traffic with async processing and topic/retention tuning.”

“Backend/data engineer focused on production-grade Python services and AWS platforms: builds FastAPI microservices on EKS with strong reliability patterns, CI/CD, and observability. Also delivers AWS Glue/Redshift analytics pipelines with schema-evolution and data-quality safeguards, and has modernized legacy batch processing into maintainable services with parallel-run parity validation and feature-flagged rollouts.”

“ML engineer/data scientist who built and deployed a real-time fraud detection platform at Citi on AWS SageMaker, processing 3M+ daily transactions and improving fraud response by 28%. Combines unsupervised anomaly detection (autoencoders) with ensemble models (XGBoost/Random Forest) plus Airflow/Step Functions orchestration, drift monitoring, and explainability (SHAP) to keep models reliable and compliant in production.”

“Backend/ML platform engineer who owns end-to-end delivery of ML-serving APIs (FastAPI + TensorFlow) and runs them reliably on Kubernetes using ArgoCD GitOps. Has hands-on experience solving production-only issues (probe tuning for model warm-up, resource profiling) and building scalable Kafka streaming pipelines, plus supporting phased on-prem to AWS migrations with dependency discovery and recreation of hidden jobs/workflows.”

Allen Saunders

Screened

Senior DevOps/Solutions Engineer specializing in CI/CD, cloud platforms, and API integrations

San Francisco, California11y exp

“Solutions Architect with 5+ years leading pre- and post-sales engagements, focused on taking complex tooling from test/prototype to secure production through a structured discovery-to-deployment approach. Experienced in LLM workflow troubleshooting using tools like Langfuse/Gopher and in developer enablement via concise, hands-on workshops (e.g., Jenkins on Kubernetes at scale). Has navigated internal and external blockers to drive adoption and keep enterprise deals moving (including a Jenkins sale to Love's).”

“GCP-focused database/infrastructure engineer with hands-on production support for Cloud SQL and Firestore, spanning provisioning, IAM, scaling, backups, and performance tuning. They also described supporting a hybrid GCP architecture for a monolithic on-prem PostgreSQL workload and resolving a major latency incident by tracing cascading failures and fixing indexing issues.”