Vetted Kubernetes Professionals

PoHung Chen

Screened

Junior AI/ML Engineer specializing in MLOps and real-time model serving

New York, NY2y exp

“Software engineer with Amazon experience who has built LLM-powered and hybrid ML systems for ad auction/relevance at massive scale. Most notably, they described redesigning brand-query classification with a GPT-4-assisted offline cache plus fallback architecture that improved accuracy from 72% to 99%, reduced latency and costs, and was credited with an estimated $130M revenue lift.”

Patrick Jose

Screened

Senior AI Engineer specializing in LLM applications and full-stack systems

San Francisco, CA8y exp

“Built and owned a production LLM/RAG customer support assistant end-to-end, from prototype through deployment, monitoring, and iteration. Their work automated roughly 40% of common support queries and cut response times by about 30%, while also creating reusable Python inference services that improved consistency and team velocity.”

“Atlassian ML/AI engineer who has shipped end-to-end production systems combining classical ML, streaming infrastructure, and LLM-based personalization to improve onboarding and free-to-paid conversion. Particularly strong in turning research-style RAG and reranking ideas into low-latency, reliable product systems with robust evaluation, safety guardrails, and reusable platform services for other teams.”

“Engineering leader who built and delivered an IoT smart-spaces platform for the self-storage and smart-living domains, translating customer requirements into architecture, capability maps, and a multi-milestone roadmap. Personally stood up missing AI/ML capabilities (including churn prediction) using Databricks (Delta Lake/MLflow), enabling follow-on features like energy optimization and security/anomaly detection. Scaled an org from 20 to 80+ with disciplined Agile planning (Jira Advanced Roadmaps/Confluence) and strong executive/customer-facing leadership during high-stakes customer commitments.”

Timothy Lee

Screened

Senior Full-Stack Engineer specializing in AI platforms and scalable web systems

Live Oak, FL12y exp

“Built and shipped production agentic/LLM systems that could safely perform real customer and subscription operations, not just answer questions. Demonstrates unusually strong depth in agent orchestration, tool safety, evals, tracing, and backend workflow design across Node.js/TypeScript, Go, Redis, Postgres, Kafka, and GPT-4.”

“Entrepreneurially driven technical leader seeking to partner with a founder/business plan owner to provide technical expertise. Helped drive Wiser's expansion into Europe by evaluating acquisition targets' technical estates and making the recommendation that was chosen. Applied lean, high-leverage product thinking at Nabis on a two-sided marketplace, delivering buyer value with a simple algorithm and later adding paid boosting for brands.”

“Graphics software engineer with academic robotics/HRI experience at Oregon State University under Dr. Heather Knight, leading a ROS+Python physical robot and Unity/C# VR system to study how motion/texture/collisions are perceived in VR (2 papers + thesis). Also built ROS-based Wizard-of-Oz TurtleBot study systems and multi-robot coordination experiments, plus industry experience with Docker/Kubeflow ML tooling and Azure DevOps CI/CD automation.”

“ML/LLM engineer with Stripe and Adobe experience who productionized a transformer-based Payments Foundation Model for real-time fraud detection at global scale (billions of transactions). Built petabyte-scale ETL/feature pipelines (Spark/EMR, Airflow, dbt, Kafka/Flink) and achieved <100ms multi-region inference (EKS, TorchServe, edge/Lambda, GPU/CPU routing) with strong PCI-DSS/GDPR compliance and explainability (SHAP/LIME), reporting a 64% fraud accuracy improvement.”

YAKKALI PAVAN

Screened

Mid-level Machine Learning & Generative AI Engineer specializing in NLP, CV, and RAG systems

USA6y exp

“Built and deployed a production LLM-powered RAG document intelligence system used by non-technical enterprise stakeholders, cutting document search time by 40%+ while improving answer consistency. Demonstrates strong MLOps/data workflow orchestration (Airflow, AWS Step Functions, managed schedulers across GCP/Azure) and a metrics-driven approach to reliability, evaluation, and cost/latency optimization with guardrails and observability.”

Keerthana Senthilnathan

Screened

Junior Machine Learning Engineer specializing in LLM systems and inference reliability

California, USA1y exp

“ML/LLM infrastructure-focused engineer who built a production stateful LLM inference service that cuts latency and GPU compute for repeated/overlapping prompts via caching with correctness guardrails. Strong in Kubernetes-based deployment and reliability engineering, using A/B testing and similarity-based evaluation to quantify performance gains without sacrificing output quality.”

Rohini Rajagopalan

Screened

Director-level Engineering Leader specializing in SaaS, Cloud Migration, and Cybersecurity

Santa clara, CA8y exp

“Senior engineering leader with experience at Cisco, Amazon, and startup Shopkick, operating at high scale (e.g., Secure Web Gateway handling ~40M QPS). Known for measurable impact across reliability and cost (85% efficacy improvement; Datadog spend cut from ~$500k/month to ~$15k/month) and for leading complex platform modernization (1-year monolith-to-microservices/event-driven migration with zero customer impact) plus compatibility-focused API design that cut device onboarding from a month to a day.”

“Built and owned the end-to-end architecture for a Quick Flows “research card” backend at AWS, using an event-driven AWS stack (SNS/SQS, DynamoDB, S3) to support asynchronous research output processing and status tracking. Emphasized maintainability via unit tests, smoke tests, and CI/CD with staged environments (devtest and gamma).”

Durgaprasad G

Screened

Mid-level AI/ML Engineer specializing in LLM infrastructure, RAG, and agentic systems

New York City, NY3y exp

“Stripe engineer who owned and unified multiple team RAG systems into a shared production platform used by 200+ internal operators, deployed on EKS with Kafka ingestion and hybrid retrieval. Drove measurable business outcomes including <400ms latency, ~35% inference cost reduction, ~25% accuracy lift via fine-tuning, and real-time auto-approval of 80%+ merchant compliance applications through strong observability and reliability patterns.”

“Unity/C# gameplay engineer who has shipped a modular, data-driven combat ability system with strong measurable outcomes (≈80% fewer GC allocations, 15–20% better frame times, 10–12% higher early retention). Also integrated an LLM-driven NPC dialogue/quest hint system with a C#/.NET backend, caching/guardrails, and telemetry-driven iteration, and shipped Photon PUN real-time 4-player co-op plus a shared codebase across Meta Quest VR and iOS/Android.”

“Fintech engineer with high-ownership startup experience at Column, where they led a Go rewrite of a core banking API that cut transaction errors by 98% and increased throughput by 40%. Brings a rare mix of backend systems depth in compliance-sensitive money movement infrastructure and frontend platform experience building React design systems, with earlier experience at Meta on recommendation APIs and News Feed.”

“Amazon Prime Video backend engineer who built and operated high-traffic Python/FastAPI services and AWS-native data/batch systems. Demonstrates strong production reliability and incident ownership (CloudWatch/X-Ray), plus measurable performance wins (8s to <200ms query latency, ~40% CPU reduction) and cost-focused architectures (Lambda + ECS/Fargate with Fargate Spot).”

“Data science/NLP practitioner with experience at NVIDIA and Microsoft building production-grade NLP and data-linking systems. Has delivered high-performing pipelines (e.g., F1 0.92) and large-scale entity resolution (F1 0.89), plus semantic search using embeddings and Pinecone with ~30–40% relevance gains, backed by rigorous validation (A/B tests, ROUGE, MRR) and strong MLOps/workflow tooling (Airflow, Databricks, FastAPI, MLflow, Prometheus/ELK).”

“ML/NLP engineer with experience building production-grade legal-tech and data platforms, including a GPT-4/LangChain contract review system using ElasticSearch embeddings (RAG) deployed on AWS EKS. Strong in entity resolution and scalable batch/streaming pipelines (Kafka/Spark), with measurable impact (70%+ reduction in contract review time) and a focus on monitoring and CI/CD for reliable delivery.”

“ML/robotics engineer with Apple experience who built a computer-vision-driven industrial defect detection system integrating a robotic arm with ROS-based real-time inference on an edge GPU. Drove major performance gains (cut inference time ~60% via quantization + TensorRT) and improved robustness to lighting/material variation, with strong emphasis on production reliability (health checks, watchdogs, observability, CI/CD) and interest in shaping early-stage startup engineering culture.”

“Backend/platform engineer with deep AWS experience who built a high-reliability ingestion platform (Lambda + Step Functions + DynamoDB) that became the single source of truth for training/qualification certification data across an AU region, handling high-volume async updates with strong consistency controls. Also led a major API migration from Lambda to ECS/Fargate to eliminate cold starts and increase throughput, and has hands-on EKS/Kubernetes operations plus Kafka partitioning/ordering expertise.”

“Engineering leader in cloud security at SysTech with player-coach experience spanning cross-team data/ownership standardization and reporting platform user-journey improvements. Stays technically deep through observability (SLA/SLOs, dashboards, alerting), rigorous code reviews (including AI-assisted coding), and end-to-end incident ownership in IAM/agentless cloud event collection. Targeting $270K–$300K base plus bonus/equity.”

Sandeep Rohilla

Screened

Principal Backend/Platform Engineer specializing in GenAI agent orchestration and LLM pipelines

San Francisco, CA19y exp

“LLM-focused engineer/sales-engineering profile with hands-on experience productionizing complex systems: scalable distributed architecture, multi-tenant monitoring, canary/shadow rollouts, and robust fallback strategies. Demonstrated real-time troubleshooting depth (p99 latency spikes traced to DB connection limits causing retry storms) and strong developer-facing communication via RAG workshops and live, customer-specific demos that helped close deals quickly.”

“Built and shipped production AI systems spanning customer support automation at Uber, privacy-preserving federated health modeling on iOS, and an open-source semantic search layer for Postgres. Stands out for combining strong LLM/product instincts with rigorous eval design, measurable production impact, and zero-to-one execution across backend, mobile, and developer infrastructure.”

“Built and owned end-to-end deployment and AI support workflows spanning CI/CD, Kubernetes, Terraform, and LLM/RAG systems. Stands out for combining DevOps delivery with production AI operations, including secure tool-calling, incident debugging, retrieval quality controls, and validation-first document ingestion for messy real-world inputs.”