Vetted Kubernetes Professionals

Bill Cheng

Screened ReferencesStrong rec.

Director-level Engineering Leader specializing in SaaS platforms and AI systems

Remote, USA26y exp

“Entrepreneurial candidate building an LLC focused on applying AI to improve call center customer service, with an early go-to-market focus on local government call centers. They are already in discussions with a government prospect and have a clear thesis around solving high turnover and low knowledge retention through AI-assisted training and support systems.”

“Research-focused software engineer who builds performance-critical Python/C++ systems emphasizing correctness, state-transition precision, and distributed coordination. Created an automated simulation-based testing/validation framework for quantum programs that caught subtle logic/type errors early, reduced debugging time, and improved developer confidence through strong observability and scalable test generation.”

“Built and shipped a production LLM-powered grading platform that automates rubric-aligned scoring and feedback, with strong guardrails (RAG grounding, structured JSON, validation/retries) and operational rigor (metrics, drift monitoring). Experienced using CrewAI to orchestrate multi-agent workflows end-to-end and validating quality via gold-set benchmarking against human graders with regression testing on every prompt/model change.”

“Backend/data engineer who has maintained high-traffic FastAPI microservices and delivered a hybrid AWS serverless+containers platform using Terraform and GitHub Actions, with secrets managed via Secrets Manager/SSM. Also led modernization of a mission-critical 10,000+ line SAS financial reporting engine into Python microservices and built AWS Glue ETL pipelines feeding a centralized data lake.”

“Frontend engineer who led the end-to-end UI for an internal employee catalog tool at Genetec, building React/TypeScript dashboards with complex search filters. Emphasizes tight product-owner feedback loops (weekly demos), Figma-based design alignment, and disciplined delivery practices using CI/CD, automated tests, and version tagging for rollouts/reverts.”

“AI/ML engineer with CVS Health experience deploying production LLM systems in regulated healthcare settings, including a large-scale RAG solution (1M+ documents) built for compliance-grade, auditable policy/regulatory Q&A with strong anti-hallucination controls. Also delivered an NLP summarization system for physician notes/case narratives by partnering closely with non-technical care operations stakeholders and iterating via prototypes, dashboards, and feedback loops.”

“Backend-focused JavaScript/Node.js engineer with e-commerce domain depth from Decathlon, working on foundational microservices for order management, inventory, and fulfillment integrations. Led an infrastructure redesign and shipped a Shopify-based persistent cart experience, diagnosing early production issues via monitoring/log analysis and improving reliability through stronger session persistence and fault-tolerant architecture.”

“Backend-leaning full-stack engineer in lending/financial services (Kotak Mahindra Bank Autos360; currently at Ally Financial) working on Spring Boot microservices with React dashboards. Has built reliability improvements for credit-bureau integrations (Experian) and created an internal monitoring/reporting platform that aggregates metrics/logs/ETL across services, cutting troubleshooting by ~40%.”

“Open-source JavaScript library contributor/maintainer focused on performance and usability—uses profiling and user feedback to optimize large-dataset processing and modernize abstractions. Refactored a nested-callback event handling system into an observer-pattern dispatcher with batched event queues, reducing CPU usage and improving maintainability; also handles community-reported crashes by reproducing issues, fixing memory leaks, and updating docs.”

“Backend engineer/technical lead with experience building and operating real-time blockchain analytics systems at Merkle Science. Owned high-traffic Django/DRF services and Kafka streaming pipelines processing millions of events daily, with deep focus on performance (N+1 fixes, indexing, caching) and reliability (DLQs, retries, monitoring). Also led containerization and Kubernetes/GitOps-style CI/CD on Google Cloud, including a migration off Google App Engine to reduce cost and improve scalability.”

“Built an LLM-powered academic research assistant for a professor (LangChain + OpenAI + arXiv) focused on synthesizing papers quickly, with emphasis on reliability (ReAct prompting, citation verification) and cost control (caching). Has production MLOps/orchestration experience at Cisco and HCL Tech using Kubernetes, plus MLflow and GitHub Actions for lifecycle management and CI/CD.”

“Backend/platform engineer who owns policy-lifecycle workflow microservices built in Python/FastAPI with async + DDD, Kafka event processing, SQLAlchemy, JWT/RBAC, and Redis caching (cut DB load ~40%). Experienced deploying Java and Python microservices to Kubernetes with Helm and GitOps (ArgoCD) plus Jenkins/GitHub Actions pipelines to AWS/ECR, and has supported phased on-prem-to-cloud migrations with dependency mapping and data consistency strategies.”

“ML/NLP practitioner who built a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system for large financial and operational document sets using Sentence-Transformers (all-mpnet-base-v2) and a vector DB (e.g., Pinecone), with a strong focus on retrieval evaluation and chunking strategy optimization. Experienced in entity resolution (rules + embedding similarity with type-specific thresholds) and in productionizing scalable Python data workflows using Airflow/Dagster and Spark.”

“AI/ML Engineer who built a production RAG-based LLM system for insurance policy documents, turning thousands of messy PDFs into a searchable index using LangChain, Azure AI Search vectors, hybrid retrieval, and FastAPI. Strong focus on evaluation (MRR/precision@k/recall@k, REGAS) and performance optimization (vLLM), with prior clinical NLP experience using BERT-based NER validated on ground-truth datasets.”

“Recent J&J intern who built a conversational RAG agent and led a shift from a monolithic model to a modular RAG workflow, cutting response time from several days to under a second by tackling data fragmentation, context retention, and embedding/latency optimization. Also worked on a large (7B-parameter) multimodal VQA pipeline for healthcare research and stays current via NeurIPS/ICLR and open-source contributions.”

“Robotics engineer with hands-on experience scaling a multi-vendor heterogeneous warehouse robot fleet, building a distributed “traffic manager” for collision avoidance and real-time rerouting using CBS/MAPF and DCOP-style negotiation. Strong real-time/safety-critical systems background (RTOS, deterministic lock-free multithreading) plus modern perception and simulation tooling (CNN-LSTM/transformers, CARLA/Isaac Sim, VIO/GTSAM, camera-IMU calibration). Startup-oriented and comfortable moving quickly from prototype to production.”

“Built a secure, on-prem/private GPT assistant to replace manual SharePoint-style search across thousands of policies/SOPs/engineering docs, using a production RAG stack (LangChain/LangGraph, FAISS/Chroma, PyMuPDF+OCR, vLLM). Implemented layout-aware ingestion (including table-to-JSON) and a multi-agent retrieval/generation/verification workflow with strong observability and compliance guardrails, delivering ~70% reduction in search time.”

“AI/ML engineer who has deployed transformer-based NLP systems to production via Python REST APIs and Kubernetes on AWS/Azure, with a strong focus on latency optimization (p95), reliability, and scalable orchestration. Demonstrates pragmatic model tradeoff decision-making and strong stakeholder collaboration—improving adoption by making outputs more actionable with summaries, extracted fields, and confidence indicators.”

“Hands-on backend/AI engineer who solo-built two production Claude-based agent systems: an internal Slack RAG over Confluence/Jira/code/regulatory docs and a HIPAA/GDPR-compliant patient chatbot with embedding guardrails and expert-in-the-loop evals. Also architected a multi-region patient portal + microservices platform with Terraform/CI-CD and federated gateways, delivering major onboarding automation and strong reliability wins (PgBouncer, chaos/perf testing).”

“Backend engineer with American Express experience maintaining an internal Python/Flask rewards simulation microservice used by product analysts and QA. Demonstrated strong performance and scalability work: moved batch simulations to Celery, added Redis caching to cut DynamoDB latency, and tuned Postgres/SQLAlchemy queries with EXPLAIN ANALYZE and composite indexes (bringing API responses under ~200ms by queueing jobs). Also has experience integrating ML via Flask-based model-serving APIs (scikit-learn/LightGBM packaged with joblib) and designing multi-tenant data isolation and tenant-specific configuration systems.”

“Backend engineer working on high-volume insurance claims intake systems who shipped a production GenAI document-classification capability in Spring Boot microservices. Emphasizes reliability in LLM systems (strict schemas, confidence thresholds, monitoring, and manual-review fallbacks) and runs evaluation loops with labeled historical documents to drive prompt/validation improvements and reduce manual review.”

“Backend/ML platform engineer in the insurance domain who built and shipped an AI-driven risk scoring/fraud detection service for underwriting. Runs containerized .NET Core and Python inference services on Azure (AKS + GPU nodes) with Terraform/ARM and Azure DevOps CI/CD, and has hands-on experience improving reliability under peak load plus implementing production AI guardrails (drift monitoring, fallbacks, human review, audit logs).”

“Cloud/DevOps engineer (6+ years) with healthcare domain experience who has owned production AWS systems end-to-end—building real-time data pipelines and an admission forecasting ML service delivered via API and Tableau. Led EMR modernization from on-prem/VMs to containerized AWS using phased migration and blue-green deployments, achieving ~99.5% uptime while cutting on-prem footprint ~30% and driving major automation gains (up to ~90% manual work reduction).”

“Full-stack engineer who built a cloud storage app feature (file upload/management) with Next.js App Router + TypeScript and owned post-launch improvements. Also has internship experience building a geospatial AI chatbot: designed Postgres/PostGIS data models and optimized spatial queries, and implemented an LLM workflow orchestrated with LangChain/LangGraph plus a RAG pipeline grounded in OpenStreetMap data to reduce hallucinations.”