Vetted Mentoring Professionals

Jamie Lusk

Screened

Executive Talent Acquisition & Executive Search Leader specializing in high-growth tech

Los Angeles, CA18y exp

“Talent leader with ~20 years reporting directly to CEOs/COOs and advising seed-to-Series C startups and venture studio portfolios on 0-to-1 hiring. Built recruiting infrastructure from scratch at FightCamp (cut time-to-hire to ~35 days with ~98% acceptance) and has proven hands-on executive search impact, including taking over and closing a Chief Product Officer search in ~45 days.”

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.”

Allison MacMillan

Screened

Engineering Manager specializing in programmatic advertising and large-scale backend systems

San Francisco, CA7y exp

“Engineering manager with recent hands-on technical leadership in vendor-based geo augmentation, including making a key pivot from a broken vendor SDK to an internal data ingestion approach. Previously shipped impactful Python microservice refactors that reduced unnecessary data processing/storage and improved runtime payload efficiency, and has owned on-call incidents through mitigation (scaling pods) and prevention process changes.”

Karel Chabera

Screened

Senior Technical Game Designer specializing in gameplay systems and pipelines

Orlando, FL9y exp

“Modes/progression designer on EA College Football (Dynasty and Road to Glory) who has owned multiple shipped progression systems, including recruiting and Road to Glory progression (meters, in-game reward triggers, and a "coach trust" meta-progression). Focused on modular system design and tuning/balancing for player-facing challenges and rewards, with strong QA-driven iteration and Blueprint-based prototyping practices.”

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).”

Jay Passarella

Screened

Senior Video Production Manager specializing in sports storytelling and postproduction

Keyport, NJ18y exp

“Video editor/post-production specialist with deep Premiere Pro expertise and strong After Effects capability, currently editing for the USGA YouTube channel (features/tributes/hype content). Built the Midnight Sun Company channel from scratch starting in 2013, including a music video that surpassed 5M views, and has experience leading and mentoring a small team of editors.”

“Early-career candidate with internship experience spanning SaaS market research for emergency response and patent infringement analysis. Stands out for rigorous research, comfort presenting to CEO/legal stakeholders, and a thoughtful grasp of outbound fundamentals like ICP testing, trigger-based messaging, and cadence optimization despite limited direct SDR execution.”

“Previously founded and successfully exited a self-funded startup in the marine electronics and vessel monitoring/control space. Brings unusually broad end-to-end technical depth—from transistor-level design and firmware to Internet-connected systems and software—paired with a pragmatic founder mindset around market needs, differentiation, reliability, and product strategy.”

“Engineering leader with experience owning product engineering strategy, architecture, and org scaling across hospitality/workforce management and insurance startup environments. They describe being brought in to help Fourth Inc. revamp engineering for large-scale enterprise customers, while also scaling teams at The Zebra and staying hands-on with production monitoring, performance analysis, and cross-team architectural execution.”

“Strategic sales leader in education technology currently at Top Hat, owning multimillion-dollar revenue across higher education enterprise accounts in the U.S. and Canada. Stands out for building structured account-planning and pipeline disciplines that drove repeatable target overperformance, plus closing complex public-education deals including a school partnership that grew from $40K to about $12M and a county-wide rollout reaching 9,000+ students.”

Andy Trus

Screened

Senior Product Leader specializing in EdTech and AI-powered learning products

Apex, NC17y exp

“EdTech product leader with deep experience across K-12 and higher education, spanning $100M-scale platform strategy, 0-to-1 learning products, and AI-enabled assessment workflows. Particularly compelling for roles at the intersection of AI and education: they built an LLM-based content QA tool that saved $2.75M and articulate a nuanced philosophy around using AI to amplify human tutoring rather than replace it.”

“Product leader at VicRoads who rebuilt the Custom Plates digital portfolio, including an AI-powered pricing and recommendation platform that drove more than 20% revenue uplift. Stands out for combining commercial product thinking with explainable AI, regulatory compliance, and legacy-system modernization in a government-related environment.”

“Engineering director and former front-end engineering manager with a strong blend of people leadership, UX/design-system ownership, and hands-on technical depth. At Siemens, they led a 15-person US/Europe team through a SaaS-era design-system transformation, winning over resistant product teams and exceeding adoption goals; at Intellimize, they solved legacy-browser constraints with a custom TypeScript-based build pipeline that improved quality, morale, and user experience.”

Alexander Awn

Screened

Director-level UX leader specializing in automotive and inclusive design

Farmington Hills, MI21y exp

“Design and UX leader in automotive and service design who helped ship a novel 2015 Ford Mustang app featuring early augmented reality/visual search capabilities. Combines hands-on product design with strong mixed-methods research and has influenced major business decisions, including research that reportedly saved a client $8M by stopping a poor market launch.”

Susan Sorensen

Screened

Executive product leader specializing in EdTech, learning platforms, and AI-enabled outcomes

13y exp

“Education-focused product leader with 12+ years across Bridge LMS, Canvas, Kuali, and healthcare.gov, known for turning ambiguity into clear product strategy and shipping human-centered AI. They pair strong UX judgment with cross-functional leadership, including a Bridge AI course-creation launch that hit 76.8% admin adoption and a healthcare.gov enrollment redesign that cut session time to under 10 minutes.”

“AIX/IBM Power Systems engineer with hands-on production incident leadership in a regulated banking environment, using deep OS-level tooling to diagnose CPU entitlement and memory pressure issues. Experienced with HMC/vHMC, VIOS, and zero-downtime DLPAR resizing, plus PowerHA/HACMP clustering and validated failover testing. Also drives migration readiness via Bash/Python automation (60% manual-effort reduction) and phased AIX cloud/hybrid cutovers.”

“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.”

“Programmatic media specialist who owned a $50K+/month Trade Desk DSP account for Disney movie/TV launches, leveraging PMPs and rigorous testing across audiences, deals, and creative formats. Drove 5–10% week-over-week gains in video completion rate while maintaining strict brand-safety standards, and has experience leading a team of traders and translating complex performance tradeoffs into client-ready action plans.”

“Talent Acquisition leader with WeWork experience who managed a team of 3 recruiters plus a TA Coordinator while maintaining an executive-level requisition load. Partnered closely with HRBPs on org design and workforce planning, and implemented a budget-aligned requisition approval process via a weekly hiring committee. Has hands-on C-level search experience, including supporting the CEO in hiring a CFO.”

“Video editor with 15+ years of experience across major NLEs (Premiere, Final Cut, DaVinci, Sony Vegas) and a strong focus on longform YouTube retention through pacing, audio, and recurring hooks. Produced end-to-end, graphic-heavy weekly content for the Ditto Music Channel (self-filmed/edited/narrated/scripted), contributing to a library of 30–40 videos reaching ~5K–200K views each.”

“AI engineer with robotics perception experience at Forterra, building and deploying moving-object/obstacle detection models into real-time robot pipelines. Addressed training crashes/latency via sub-batch training and optimizer tuning, and improved debugging using ROS/ROS2 tooling with 3D voxel visualization and color-coded validation.”

“QA/automation engineer with experience at Riot Games’ player platform, owning E2E automation for mission-critical authentication/account flows using Playwright/JavaScript plus API automation. Built CI merge gates and nightly verification with Slack reporting, and repeatedly caught backend-driven session/authorization regressions before production. Known for stabilizing flaky UI tests via selector strategy and network intercepts, and for influencing design early with testability hooks and telemetry.”

Ronie Maydan

Screened

Senior Growth Product & CRO Specialist in SaaS, job platforms, and e-commerce

Amsterdam, Netherlands10y exp

“Growth-focused product/marketing leader with CMO experience in e-commerce marketplaces and SaaS (no gaming/F2P background). Strong in CRO, funnel analytics, and A/B testing design, with a metrics-driven approach to monitoring performance and diagnosing issues via trend analysis.”