Vetted Kotlin 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.”

“Unity/C# engineer with hands-on experience building cross-platform VR/mobile prototypes at Verizon Labs, including a networked VR cinema and virtual office application. Particularly strong in performance engineering: they describe custom update architecture, shader work, and low-level iOS optimization that enabled 60 FPS while rendering HD video textures and running voice chat simultaneously. They also bring adjacent computer vision integration experience from Nomad-Go, with a practical focus on latency, inference/render separation, and data consistency.”

Ashwith Poojary

Screened ReferencesStrong rec.

Mid-level Software & AI Engineer specializing in Robotics, LLMs, and Reinforcement Learning

4y exp

“Robotics/AI Master's thesis researcher building an LLM-driven workflow to generate and evaluate robot policies before running them in an environment. Also built a local LLM-based real-time target-tracking robot using a pan-tilt camera with LangChain + Ollama, and has hands-on ROS 2/Gazebo experience including URDF-based simulation and a TurtleBot multi-agent chase project.”

“Software engineer with strong full-stack and platform experience (TypeScript/React/Node.js) who has built real-time analytics dashboards and microservices using RabbitMQ. Demonstrates production-minded decision-making under launch pressure (manual fallback for payment-impacting third-party API issues) and has delivered internal DevOps tooling that automates compliance checks via GitHub/Jira integrations.”

“Master’s student and Deep Learning teaching assistant who teaches LLM/VLM fine-tuning (including LoRA) and built a Hugging Face LLM fine-tuned for unit conversion, improving reliability by analyzing synthetic data and filling missing number-system conversion examples. Also implemented the Raft consensus protocol using gRPC in a distributed systems course with correctness validated by unit tests.”

“Backend/AI engineer who built a Spring Boot timesheet API on AWS (Postgres, Docker, Nginx) used by hundreds of daily users and resolved severe deadline-driven latency/5XX incidents via query optimization, connection pool tuning, and Redis caching. Also shipped application-layer LLM features (Mistral + LangChain chatbot) and designed a Planner/Executor/Verifier troubleshooting agent with verification-based guardrails to prevent hallucinated root-cause analyses.”

“Full-stack engineer with strong production ownership across SDK tooling, APIs, and operations. At Statsig, built real-time SDK diagnostics spanning 16 SDKs and improved incident response (40% faster mitigation) with Datadog SLOs/alerting; also shipped an enterprise Console API + interactive OpenAPI-based docs with robust versioning/migration practices. Has early-stage startup experience at Layup Parts, translating AS-9100 compliance needs into production workflows under rapidly changing requirements.”

Lenny Lin

Screened

Mid-Level Full-Stack Software Engineer specializing in cloud, distributed systems, and LLM apps

Champaign, IL3y exp

“Built and owned a hackathon project (Gritto) with a Python/FastAPI backend that routes user text through a sequence of Gemini agents to produce structured JSON outputs. Has hands-on production deployment experience using Docker/Docker Compose, GitHub Actions CI/CD, AWS App Runner, MongoDB, and secrets management (Doppler + migration to AWS Secrets Manager), plus implemented a chat-like experience via multiple HTTP requests when SSE wasn’t viable.”

Aditya Rao

Screened

Mid-level Software Engineer specializing in backend, AI, and distributed systems

San Jose, CA5y exp

“Software engineer with 4.5 years of startup experience across programmatic advertising, health tech e-commerce, and automobile diagnostics, plus both bachelor's and master's degrees in CSE. Built an agentic global supply chain platform in a hackathon using a highly structured AI-first workflow, and has hands-on experience designing multi-agent debate systems, rollout safeguards, and observability-driven production fixes.”

“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.”

Prachika Agarwal

Screened

Senior Solutions Architect and Data Analyst specializing in cloud data platforms and experimentation

New York, NY4y exp

“Software engineer who built and scaled an internal automation/auditing tool for analyzing Google and Adobe tagging containers, adopted by 13 internal clients and saving ~15 hours per audit. Has experience shipping containerized, Kubernetes-orchestrated systems and integrating OpenAI APIs into an agentic chatbot feature (plus prior NLP chatbot work during a Cyber Peace Foundation internship).”

Sri Lalitha

Screened

Senior Full-Stack Java Engineer specializing in cloud-native microservices and FinTech

California, USA6y exp

“Backend engineer who owned a Python task management API with JWT auth, async notifications, and performance work (DB optimization/caching) to handle high volumes. Led an on-prem to Azure private cloud migration at Morgan Stanley using GitOps and IaC (Terraform/ARM) with phased rollout and rollback planning. Also built a Kafka real-time streaming pipeline with exactly-once/idempotent consumers and Prometheus/Grafana monitoring.”

Rohit Vibhu Channananjundarya

Screened

Mid-level Software Engineer specializing in distributed systems and full-stack platforms

Chicago, IL6y exp

“Engineer who treats AI as a force multiplier rather than a replacement for judgment, with hands-on experience using tools like Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, and Codex across planning, coding, testing, and review. Particularly notable for building a multi-agent PR review system that automated summarization, risk scanning, schema validation, and test suggestions, helping the team shift reviewer time toward architecture and business logic.”

“Providing technical guidance to a small team exploring a biomedical startup focused on earlier disease detection, including for remote/underserved areas. The venture is in ideation with initial research completed and is moving toward prototyping while exploring initial investment/support.”

“Engineering Manager/player-coach leading Data Infrastructure, ML/DS, and AI Engineering pods who recently shipped multiple production agentic GenAI features. Built privacy-preserving LLM workflows (PII redaction via Microsoft Presidio) and drove an AI expense-approval agent from ambiguous ask to GA, cutting approval time from ~2.5 days to <4 hours with >85% accuracy. Also owned a major LLM cost overrun incident and implemented cost observability plus circuit breakers to prevent runaway agent loops.”

Harini Vinu

Screened

Intern Software Engineer specializing in cloud, big data, and test automation

New York, United States1y exp

“Internship experience at Qualitest building and deploying an LLM-powered test automation system that reduced manual test creation and improved efficiency (~40%). Demonstrates strong production engineering for LLM systems (timeouts/retries/monitoring/caching, prompt optimization, batching) and has scaled workflows to 100+ concurrent jobs; also has orchestration experience with AWS Step Functions and Kubernetes.”