Vetted High Availability Professionals

Mark Thomas

Screened ReferencesStrong rec.

Director-level software architect specializing in cloud, distributed systems, and healthcare IT

McCalla, AL20y exp

“Startup veteran with experience at seven companies since 2004 and direct exposure to Birmingham's Innovation Depot accelerator through three different startups. Has worked closely with investment teams on MVPs and pitch decks and brings a pragmatic lens to evaluating ventures through need, margins, burn rate, cash position, and sales growth strategy.”

Nithin Reddy

Screened

Mid-Level Software Development Engineer specializing in distributed systems and event-driven architectures

Santa Clara, California4y exp

“Built and maintained an internal JavaScript/React real-time event monitoring UI used by multiple Goldman Sachs teams (e.g., Private Wealth Management and Bulk Trading Systems). Focused on scaling performance under hundreds of events/sec—using profiling, memoization, batching, and debouncing—and paired it with strong internal documentation and disciplined incident diagnosis via synthetic load testing and logs/metrics.”

“Full-stack product engineer who owned a live-events digital ticketing platform end-to-end, including blockchain-based ticket validation and high-traffic booking flows. Stands out for combining Angular/React frontend work with Java/Spring Boot backend architecture, plus strong production reliability practices around concurrency control, queues, observability, and UX optimization.”

Rob Wlaschin

Screened ReferencesStrong rec.

Director-level Engineering Manager specializing in AI platforms, FinTech, and Healthtech

Santa Clara, CA24y exp

“Serial entrepreneur building three distinct products: a context-aware AI chatbot, a connected TV companion-screen platform with an implementation client, and gamerogue.net, a mobile-optimized web-based virtual tabletop marketplace currently seeking funding. Brings hands-on fundraising experience, familiarity with the VC/accelerator ecosystem including YC, and a notably pragmatic approach to validating ideas based on existing market demand rather than speculative adoption.”

“Built and launched an internal AI troubleshooting assistant focused on safe, retrieval-first root cause analysis for enterprise systems, with strong attention to monitoring, fallback behavior, and post-launch iteration. Also owns full-stack product work across React and Java/Spring Boot, including high-volume financial operations workflows, and reports measurable LLM improvements such as ~30-40% latency reduction.”

“Internship at ActiveVM where they tackled large-scale Spring Boot 2→3/library migrations across hundreds of downstream products by combining OpenRewrite (AST-based recipes) with an LLM/RAG-based classifier that routed risky files to human experts. Reported ~70% reduction in manual effort and 90%+ accuracy after testing across multiple branches and cutovers; also built a CTR-driven book recommendation capstone showcased at the Google office in Cambridge.”

Sravanti Dandu

Screened

Mid-level Cloud Engineer specializing in AWS & Azure infrastructure automation

Arizona, USA6y exp

“Backend/platform engineer (American Express) who built a Flask-based orchestration layer to automate infrastructure provisioning and integrated Azure AD/JWT RBAC security. Strong in PostgreSQL/SQLAlchemy performance optimization (70%+ query-time reduction) and scalable async/event-driven architectures, including ML inference pipelines (SageMaker/Azure ML/Hugging Face) and high-throughput job queues (Celery/Redis) with reliability patterns like DLQs and idempotency.”

“ML/AI engineer at PNC who has shipped enterprise-grade RAG and document intelligence systems for compliance and policy workflows. Stands out for combining LLM product thinking with production rigor—owning FastAPI/Kubernetes deployments, monitoring, evaluation, and human-feedback loops that drove measurable gains like 40% faster policy search and 30% faster compliance review.”

“Engineer with a process-driven approach to AI-assisted software development, focused on orchestrating where AI adds value while maintaining human review and verification. Has applied this in backend work such as an S3-based invoice pipeline and used multi-agent workflows to speed up large API refactors across many endpoints.”

“Backend-focused engineer at Wells Fargo owning production payments features end-to-end, including Spring Boot REST services, CI/CD + containerized AWS deployments, and CloudWatch-based observability. Has hands-on experience stabilizing high-traffic transaction workflows and building reliable ingestion/integration flows using idempotency, retries/backoff, and reconciliation.”

“Backend engineer who has delivered large, measurable performance wins (10x throughput, 67% latency reduction) by combining Flask microservices, Redis caching, and AWS autoscaling/observability. Has hands-on depth in SQLAlchemy/Postgres optimization and production scaling pitfalls (cache consistency, connection exhaustion), plus experience deploying real-time ML inference (XGBoost) on AWS Lambda and building secure multi-tenant Kubernetes isolation.”

“Built a production internal LLM-powered knowledge assistant using a RAG architecture (Python, LLM APIs, cloud services) that answers employee questions with sourced, grounded responses from internal documents. Demonstrates strong practical depth in retrieval tuning (chunking/metadata filters), orchestration with LangChain, and production reliability practices (latency optimization, automated embedding refresh, evaluation metrics, logging/monitoring) while partnering closely with non-technical operations teams.”