Vetted Kubernetes Professionals

“Data/ML engineer in financial services (Northern Trust) who built a production RAG-based LLM system to connect structured transaction/portfolio data with unstructured market and internal documents for risk teams. Strong in end-to-end pipelines (AWS Glue/Airflow/PySpark), entity resolution, and taking models from prototype to reliable daily production with performance tuning (LoRA + TensorRT) and monitoring.”

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.”

“Built and productionized an internal GenAI chatbot that makes company policy/SOP knowledge instantly searchable, using a secure RAG architecture on AWS (Bedrock/Titan embeddings/OpenSearch Serverless, Textract/Lambda/S3 ingestion, Claude 3 Sonnet). Demonstrates strong MLOps/orchestration experience (Airflow, Step Functions with Lambda/Glue/SageMaker) and a rigorous reliability approach (RAGAS metrics, A/B testing, citation validation, monitoring), including collaboration with compliance stakeholders via review dashboards.”

“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.”

“Unity/C# AR developer who built a Pokemon Go-like location-based gameplay system end-to-end, spanning backend geospatial filtering (bounding box + Haversine), native iOS location/heading plugins, and Unity AR/UI/spawn logic, with a strong focus on real-world reliability issues like GPS drift. Also prototyped an AI pipeline combining on-device Core ML image segmentation with cloud-hosted PiFU HD (Docker/Kubernetes on GCP with GPU provisioning), ultimately shelving it due to cost/latency and model reliability constraints.”

“Infrastructure/automation engineer with experience bridging post-acquisition environments (Pandora + SiriusXM) by building an API-driven integration to provision Debian workloads on RHV while preserving iPXE-based imaging workflows. Strong in deep debugging across virtualization/network/OS layers (e.g., resolving virtio/vCPU contention causing network/NFS issues) and in extending automation tooling via custom Ansible/Python modules. Also has exposure to biomanufacturing on-prem devices (Hamiltons, shakers) alongside AWS microservices.”

“Software engineer with JPMorgan Chase experience building a real-time operations console backend on Spring Boot/Kafka/Kubernetes and resolving peak-load latency through profiling, indexing, caching, and async processing. Also built and owned an AI-driven digital-archives metadata pipeline during a master’s at UNT using OCR + LLaMA-based prompting with validation, near-human accuracy, and human-in-the-loop guardrails.”

Preethi Bandari

Screened ReferencesStrong rec.

Mid-level Full-Stack Developer specializing in scalable web applications

Memphis, TN5y exp

“Developer who uses AI tools pragmatically to accelerate coding while keeping full ownership of system design and decision-making. Emphasizes rigorous review, testing, and alignment with architecture, security, and performance standards, and stays current on AI through both industry sources and hands-on experimentation.”

“Built across cloud infrastructure, AI-powered product workflows, and backend data reliability in environments including Northeastern, Knead, and Grafx. Particularly compelling for roles needing someone who can both ship AWS-based systems end-to-end and debug messy production issues involving caching, APIs, and data pipelines.”

Rathi Anand

Screened ReferencesStrong rec.

Senior Full-Stack Software Engineer specializing in Insurance, FinTech, and AI/ML applications

Dublin, CA17y exp

“AI/backend engineer who fine-tuned and deployed a production LLM chatbot using a LangChain + FAISS RAG pipeline, improving latency with PEFT/LoRA and driving strong business impact (40% customer adoption; 92% satisfaction). Also served as technical lead on a data aggregation system for underwriting/quoting, introducing GraphQL for more efficient, maintainable querying and applying CDC to keep cached ranking data fresh at scale.”

“ML/AI engineer with hands-on ownership of production recommendation and GenAI systems, spanning experimentation, deployment, monitoring, and iteration. Stands out for delivering measurable outcomes—22% CTR lift, 15% conversion lift, and a 30% reduction in support tickets—while demonstrating strong judgment on latency, cost, and safety tradeoffs in real-world systems.”

“Bootstrapped founder/fractional-CTO type building a community-first tooling platform and niche product lab, emphasizing trust and "family" culture. Operates extremely lean by self-hosting open-source LLM tooling locally and leverages a network of senior generalists willing to trade short-term compensation for learning and equity. Has worked across real estate tech, logistics, and hospitality POS and is applying a multi-modal "brain trails" concept to product opportunities.”

“Software engineer with 2 years of professional full-stack experience plus a CS master's journey in the US, who has since focused heavily on building hackathon-winning AI systems. Stands out for combining production-minded backend architecture, TypeScript-heavy reliability work, and multi-agent LLM applications spanning physical security and insurance claims automation.”

Preetham Dandu

Screened ReferencesModerate rec.

Junior Software Engineer specializing in backend, distributed systems, and cloud platforms

Stony Brook, NY1y exp

“MS candidate with strong backend/data engineering focus who builds research and data systems with production-grade rigor (reproducibility, observability, restartability). Has hands-on experience securing and scaling FastAPI-based gateways in front of Java microservices, leading SQL Server→Snowflake migrations with dual-write/feature-flag rollouts, and hardening Kafka-based fleet-tracking systems against out-of-order and duplicate events.”

“Full-stack engineer with strong Next.js App Router/TypeScript experience who built production dataset search/filtering and data-heavy dashboards backed by Postgres. Demonstrates hands-on performance work across the stack (EXPLAIN ANALYZE, composite indexes, caching, React profiling/memoization) and has built durable, Temporal-like orchestrated data-processing workflows with idempotency and retry strategies in an early-stage startup environment (Gaia AI).”

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.”