Vetted Leadership Professionals

Sakid Ahmed

Screened

Executive Telecom & Wireless Connectivity Leader (GM/VP Engineering)

Chicago, IL29y exp

“Operator with experience in a private equity-backed business that was carved out of a larger company and later taken public. Brings a startup-builder mindset from within larger-company environments, with emphasis on P&L ownership, go-to-market strategy, product strategy, and evaluating ideas through product-market fit and scalable market demand.”

Richard Bemis

Screened

Executive CIO/CTO/CDO specializing in data, AI/ML, and digital transformation

Long Beach, CA21y exp

“Founder building a healthcare provider data management startup who has progressed from problem identification to product architecture, patent filing, prototype development, beta customer outreach, and angel fundraising. They also have experience performing technical assessments for VCs and approach company-building with a structured focus on customer demand, risk mitigation, IP protection, and candid core-team formation.”

“Seasoned entrepreneur with decades of cross-functional business experience who initially expected a CTO role at an existing company rather than a founder track. Brings a distinctive mix of technical scalability thinking, complex integration awareness, education/multimedia production capability, and formal credentials including a PhD, security clearances, and AI and leadership certifications.”

Allan Farinas

Screened

Senior Full-Stack Software Engineer specializing in Python and AWS

West Covina, CA11y exp

“Backend/data engineer who has built production Python microservices (FastAPI) and AWS-native platforms for event ingestion and analytics, combining ECS/Fargate + Lambda with CloudFormation-driven environments and strong secrets/IAM practices. Experienced modernizing legacy logic with parallel-run parity validation and safe phased cutovers, and has demonstrated measurable SQL tuning wins (20–30s down to 1–2s) plus incident ownership in Glue/Step Functions ETL pipelines.”

MICHELLE WEATHERSBY

Screened

Executive Governance & Compliance Leader specializing in AI and multi-cloud security

TX & GA25y exp

“Operations and governance/risk consultant with experience across retail, beauty, construction, and consulting, drawing on prior work at MetLife, Fidelity, and BB&T. Known for replacing manual, spreadsheet-driven compliance/operations with centralized governance dashboards and scalable frameworks, and for mentoring early-stage founders using RACI, financial controls, and AI/automation to scale deliberately.”

Wayne PetinaudJr.

Screened

Director-level Talent Acquisition Leader specializing in SaaS, FinTech, and Design

New York, NY7y exp

“Recruiting leader and hands-on executive search player/coach who has managed teams at Acquire and Mastercard and partnered closely with HRBPs on sensitive, change-management hiring. Pre-Series B at Acquire, collaborated with CFO/CPO/founders on a location-based hiring strategy that reduced salary costs by 30%+. Recently at Paperless Post, implemented AI-era technical assessment and interview tooling (Coderbyte, BrightHire) to improve candidate quality and process efficiency.”

Bhumika Shah

Screened

Mid-level Product Manager specializing in data-driven product strategy and analytics

TX, USA3y exp

“Procurement/sourcing professional with hands-on experience selecting and rolling out an analytics dashboard vendor end-to-end—using stakeholder discovery, POCs, and a scoring matrix—then negotiating a ~26% cost reduction and waiving implementation fees. Also demonstrates strong trade compliance instincts by catching and correcting an incorrect tariff code that would have increased duties ~18%, and uses structured milestone/risk tracking (RAG) to keep OTD and approvals on track.”

Regina Cherepinsky

Screened

Director-level Retail & Brand Management leader specializing in luxury fashion and beauty

Los Angeles, CA16y exp

“Brand/partnership leader with high-profile celebrity brand experience, including launching the Kardashian Kollection into hundreds of stores and hiring 50 VIP selling specialists nationwide. Managed end-to-end brand management across product, placement, and retailer/celebrity stakeholder satisfaction, and was promoted to VP of a fragrance endeavor within 6 months; also partnered closely with Revlon on an Elizabeth Taylor fragrance launch (GWP/packaging).”

“Built Bargain Bricks end-to-end as a solo creator, handling product ideation, design, backend, APIs, website, and native iOS/Android apps. They actively maintain and iterate on the product, which has over 1,000 downloads, and have improved conversion through UI changes that surfaced the best deal above the fold.”

“Senior electrical engineer with oil & gas/petrochemical power systems experience, including leading a high-impact 34.5kV cable remediation project that removed a major plant reliability risk after transformer trips at peak load. Brings practical MV infrastructure knowledge, ETAP exposure, and strong standards-based execution across emergency power, redundancy, and maintainability.”

“Software engineer with hands-on embedded/robotics coursework experience (Arduino sensor integration and input handling built from scratch without external libraries) and strong DevOps/engineering productivity impact at work, including leading a CI/CD enhancement that runs only impacted tests to catch issues before PR approval.”

“Serial venture builder/operator across ad tech, media delivery, search engines, international content management, and ecommerce; has raised up to $150M and been involved in 8 acquisitions or IP-acquisition events. Known for refactoring/re-engineering smaller or troubled platforms into higher-value businesses, including building yield-management algorithms and a Kafka-like system to improve ad delivery profitability.”

“Robotics engineer/team lead who built an autonomous lunar rover for the NASA Lunabotics challenge, owning electrical systems, comms (UART/WiFi), and autonomy using RealSense + custom YOLO on a Jetson Orin Nano. Also has extensive ROS 2 experience, including creating a ROS2+Gazebo environment with ros2_control custom controllers for a large-scale additive manufacturing printer and research/thesis work in multi-robot coordination and robustness.”

“Backend engineer with hands-on experience scaling a Python/Flask incident-logging platform processing thousands of daily logs. Strong in performance tuning (PostgreSQL/SQLAlchemy query optimization, partitioning, summary tables) and reliability patterns (Redis caching, Celery background workers, Docker + Jenkins CI/CD), with some multi-tenant data isolation experience via separate DBs/schemas.”

“Built and owned major parts of a real-time distributed AI fraud-detection pipeline (ingestion, inference microservice integration, and automated action layer), optimizing latency and observability and reducing false positives by ~35%. Understands ROS/ROS2 concepts (nodes/topics/services) and planned hands-on ramp-up via ROS2 pub/sub exercises and Gazebo simulation, but has not worked on physical robots or ROS in production.”

“Operations/finance-focused advisor with experience helping early-stage companies build lightweight but effective operating systems—monthly financial reporting, KPI frameworks tied to revenue levers, and forecasting cadences using tools like QuickBooks and Metabase. Has also implemented scalable request-prioritization (Jira) and guided founder/executive org design changes, including transitioning a founder to president while elevating an internal leader to CEO.”

Hannah Avey-Overfelt

Screened

Multimedia Designer specializing in animation, video production, and campaign creative

Cary, NC

“Marketing designer with John Deere and Gear.com experience spanning high-polish campaign creative, web product-page image overhauls at scale, and multi-platform video editing in Premiere Pro. Drove international dealer adoption of campaign assets (notably Canada and France) and measures impact through clicks/downloads, while maintaining fast remote feedback loops across time zones.”

Jhansi Bendi

Screened

Senior Software Engineer specializing in cloud-native microservices and event-driven systems

Antioch, CA18y exp

“Senior engineer/tech lead with 18+ years building large-scale distributed applications, specializing in performance and reliability improvements. Recently owned multiple apps on an email personalization team, shipping major optimizations (including a push-update feature and audience-count architecture redesign) that reportedly lifted system performance from ~50% to ~99% while also leading code standards, reviews, and mentoring.”

Nishantkumar Asodariya

Screened

Mid-level Supply Chain Analyst specializing in global logistics automation and forecasting

USA4y exp

“Built and shipped a production LLM-powered recruiting workflow that ranks resumes against job descriptions, generates evidence-based justifications, and finds "hidden fit" candidates using embeddings + RAG. Demonstrates strong production engineering around hallucination control, latency, and predictable LLM cost management (budget checks, top-K pruning, tenant caps), plus orchestration experience with Airflow/Prefect/Kubernetes and a structured evaluation/monitoring methodology for AI agents.”

“Robotics/software engineer who deployed a Raspberry Pi computer-vision-controlled 3-axis platform at FuelCell Energy, improving screen-print alignment from >10mm to 0.01mm repeatability via encoder-based closed-loop PID control. Currently designing an AI-enabled hearing-aid accessory for the cocktail party problem using a multi-mic array, beamforming, and an edge-accelerated neural network with <10ms latency via shared-memory DSP integration.”

“Unity gameplay/AI engineer with driving-simulator experience who re-architected state-based AI using multithreading (including a threaded 2D collision/location checker) to nearly double AI traffic while improving frame rate. Has shipped on a Photon-networked title (Frankie's Revenge / RoboRevengeSquad) and is comfortable debugging tricky multiplayer spawning/movement issues with practical client-server test setups.”

“Backend engineer who built and owned an AI-powered SMS survey platform for a nonprofit serving at-risk communities (internet-limited users), using Cloudflare Workers + Twilio and a state-machine survey engine. Scaled it to ~10k active users with near-zero downtime, added English/Spanish support, and iteratively improved LLM behavior (Claude 3.7 Sonnet) to handle nuanced, real-world SMS responses reliably.”

Allwyn Brown

Screened

Executive Law Enforcement Leader specializing in constitutional policing and public safety

SF Bay Area, California41y exp

“Law enforcement operations leader who modernized a police organization by shifting from a traditional hierarchical model to a matrix structure and driving cross-functional collaboration. Served as project manager for major public-safety technology deployments (ShotSpotter, body-worn cameras with CJIS-compliant cloud storage, LPRs, CAD/RMS upgrades) while expanding community engagement and public transparency through social and video communications.”

Joseph Herbst

Screened

Executive Technology Leader specializing in IoT, PoE building automation, and semiconductors

Portland, OR35y exp

“Engineering/exec leader (CEO experience) who built a lighting controls and building automation platform from scratch, choosing an Ethernet/PoE and Node.js web-centric architecture that anticipated market shifts and later became an industry pattern. Known for rigorous vendor QA (test-to-failure) and for delivering high-profile deployments (e.g., Black Desert Resort, Resorts World Villa 66) while leading globally distributed engineering teams.”