Vetted Machine Learning 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.”

“Built a 24/7 Python/LangChain email agent in production with validation, circuit breakers, human-review escalation, and structured observability. Also applied data and automation skills at Community Dreams Foundation, including turning a vague donor-insights request into a usable donor-risk prediction workflow and raising ETL reliability from roughly 85% to 99% by diagnosing SQLite concurrency issues.”

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.”

Richie Bavasso

Screened ReferencesStrong rec.

Executive healthcare venture builder specializing in MedTech, digital health, and AI diagnostics

North Charleston, SC32y exp

“Five-time entrepreneur with 25 years across startups, venture studios, and accelerators, including current advisory work with MassChallenge, VentureWell, Scottish Development International, and German Accelerator/Start 2 Group. Most recently helped lead a UK MedTech company through multiple raises totaling over £11M plus grants, while driving FDA clearance, MVP completion, and US customer launch in a tough fundraising market.”

Ramesh Ramanathan

Screened ReferencesStrong rec.

Executive HR and IT consultant specializing in talent, operations, and AI-enabled business functions

Chantilly, VA20y exp

“High-volume full-desk recruiter who specializes in driving difficult searches to close with tight process discipline. In one standout example, they filled a highly niche Swahili-speaking video journalist role in DC by moving beyond job boards and networking into diaspora communities nationwide, ultimately relocating and closing a candidate from Maine.”

“Recent McCombs School of Business (UT Austin) Post Graduate Program graduate in Data Science & Business Analytics with hands-on project experience spanning stock clustering/segmentation and hotel booking-cancellation prediction. Strong in end-to-end analysis workflows (EDA, cleaning, feature engineering) and rigorous model comparison/selection, with exposure to boosting methods and imbalanced-data techniques; limited experience so far with embeddings/vector databases and production deployment.”

Amrit Srivastava

Screened ReferencesStrong rec.

Junior Software Engineer specializing in robotics simulation and machine learning

3y exp

“Undergraduate AI/robotics research assistant who built a city-scale robotics simulation stack for embodied question answering, including JSON-driven environment generation and a ROS 2 pipeline bridging Isaac Sim sensors (CV/LiDAR) to external ML/RL algorithms. Also created and deployed an open-source library workflow tool adopted across multiple local libraries, using GitHub Actions CI/CD for signed releases and automated updates.”

“Robotics intern at the University of Delaware who built and debugged ROS2-based multi-robot coordination systems, focusing on real-time reliability (timestamp alignment, latency/jitter instrumentation, QoS/executor tuning). Also improved SLAM stability by fixing LiDAR/encoder synchronization and tuning state-estimation parameters, with a simulation-first workflow using Gazebo and Docker/CI for reproducible deployments.”

“Built and shipped a production RAG system (“TROJAN KNOWLEDGE”) for answering questions over technical PDFs, using a 3-stage retrieval stack (BM25 + FAISS + cross-encoder) to lift F1 from 71% to 84%. Drove major performance gains with a 3-level cache (memory/Redis/disk) cutting latency from ~200ms to ~10ms, and added Prometheus/Grafana monitoring plus LangChain-based fallback logic to handle OpenAI rate limits under load.”

Rahul Vemuri

Screened ReferencesStrong rec.

Senior Full-Stack Engineer specializing in real estate and FinTech applications

San Jose, CA8y exp

“Frontend/product engineer with deep ownership in proptech affordability experiences at Houseful, translating complex home-finance inputs into clear consumer UX across onboarding, listing cards, dashboards, and property details. Stands out for combining React Native/TypeScript architecture, backend API contract shaping, and analytics instrumentation with measurable impact including 40k account creations and an 18% load-time improvement on high-traffic listing surfaces.”

Luciano Barrios

Screened ReferencesStrong rec.

Principal Hardware & Systems Architect specializing in edge AI and biometrics

Buenos Aires, Argentina25y exp

“Career startup operator now building a self-funded venture in home, professional, and industrial automation plus physical access control. Brings hands-on early-stage hardware/platform development experience along with investor-facing fundraising support, including technical presentations and introducing new ventures to existing funding relationships.”

Michael Hopkin

Screened ReferencesModerate rec.

Executive product leader specializing in AI platforms and SaaS

Portland, OR21y exp

“Senior product leader with experience rebuilding products and organizations in healthcare, research administration, public safety, and K-12 education. Stands out for building a product team from zero at Plexus and shipping an award-winning platform in 8 months, while also bringing strong human-centered AI judgment from ML compliance products at Cayuse and education strategy work at Imagine Learning.”

“Built a production AI-native internal onboarding feature that reduced manual product setup effort by combining barcode API data, product photos, structured LLM outputs, and a polished real-time camera UI. Demonstrates hands-on experience across the full stack of LLM systems: prompt/schema design, multimodal inputs, backend orchestration with SQS and vector retrieval, and production reliability through evals, telemetry, and drift monitoring.”

“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.”

“Product leader with experience driving a major international digital platform overhaul at ESPN, unifying fragmented sports properties and delivering a 30% retention lift. More recently, they have been building a human-centered AI mental health product focused on provider-guided follow-up, and they bring a personal, long-standing commitment to educational equity through tutoring and community math programs.”

“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.”

“Product engineer/designer with founder mindset who shipped a blockchain-enabled investor group/governance platform using Next.js (App Router), TypeScript, Prisma/Postgres, and Temporal. Emphasizes auth-centric onboarding (SSO + embedded wallet) to make dApp UX feel more like SaaS, and brings strong reliability practices (idempotent retries, reconciliation) plus experience demoing to investors and operating in seed-stage teams (ex-Vouched).”

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.”

“Startup product designer with a CS background who operates at the intersection of UX, product strategy, and implementation. They have owned 0-to-1 design systems, led a research-backed pivot of Fluffle from a solo job tracker to a multiplayer productivity app, and specialize in trust-building UX for AI-native products while working closely enough with engineers to influence production quality.”

“Software engineer with hands-on experience shipping production AI agents and end-to-end ecommerce workflows. They built a customer support automation agent with strong guardrails and evaluation practices, then improved it post-launch using real user data to cut latency ~30% and token cost ~25%. Also drove a zero-to-one self-serve order modification product across React UI, backend services, and cross-functional alignment.”

Laxminarayana Yaga

Screened

Mid-level AI/ML Engineer specializing in Generative AI, RAG, and MLOps

Missouri, USA4y exp

“Built and deployed a production RAG pipeline at PNC Financial Services to let risk/compliance analysts query millions of internal financial documents in natural language, reducing manual search and speeding regulatory validation. Demonstrates deep practical experience with large-scale document ingestion/OCR cleanup, retrieval performance tuning (hierarchical indexing, caching), and LLM reliability controls (grounding, citations, abstention), plus cloud orchestration on Azure and AWS.”

Shane Weinstock

Screened

Senior Data Scientist & Product Analytics Leader specializing in ML and experimentation

Austin, TX17y exp

“Aspiring founder with ~15 years of experience across varied backgrounds, motivated by frustration with slow, change-resistant large organizations and a desire to bring innovative ideas to market. Familiar with how venture capital/accelerators function (though not directly worked in them) and expresses strong willingness to take entrepreneurial risks.”