Vetted Mentoring Professionals

“HR/people leader with experience partnering directly with firm partners and C-suite leaders to drive culture and retention initiatives, including launching a Partner Connectivity Program to rebuild community during/after remote-pandemic work. Strong in people analytics (Workday/Aderant) and executive dashboards, and experienced handling complex employee relations cases and accommodations in collaboration with in-house counsel.”

“Technically oriented operator with experience driving a strategic migration to Microsoft Azure to modernize a company toward microservices and CI/CD, improving scalability and positioning for long-term optimization. Evaluates product ideas through an operational lens (efficiency, decision support, process optimization) and emphasizes building viable products with paying customers while maintaining revenue resilience.”

Stephanie Kaplar

Screened

Director-level Human Resources leader specializing in global HR operations and employee relations

New York, NY11y exp

“People leader with experience managing globally distributed teams across the US, Canada, and Brazil, including product/design/analytics functions. Partnered directly with executives to plan org restructures during multiple layoff rounds—owning future org design, role impact mapping, and company-wide communication planning to maintain clarity through change.”

Rich Wojcicki

Screened

Senior Video Producer/Editor specializing in digital content, post-production, and illustration

New York, NY20y exp

“Post supervisor and editor with 10 years of solo editing experience and 5+ years deep in Adobe Premiere, plus After Effects for light character animation, motion graphics, and title work. Created event-based video introductions for large crowds (e.g., Shoptalk) by integrating Premiere and After Effects, and has worked on widely reached content at Hyve. Known for a structured, client-collaborative multi-pass workflow and for mentoring editors using shared standards and color/FX libraries.”

Steve Van Treeck

Screened

Engineering executive specializing in SaaS platforms for transportation & logistics

Denver, CO18y exp

“Pragmatic, Lean Startup–oriented candidate who prefers validating ideas through barebones MVPs and direct customer feedback, especially when entering unfamiliar markets. Motivated to partner with visionary founders and scale accessible products by lowering barriers to entry, while maintaining financial sustainability.”

Kaushik Balakesavalu

Screened

Mid-level Full-Stack Java Developer specializing in enterprise SaaS and FinTech

Fairfax, VA5y exp

“Software engineer with fintech/retirement-fund domain experience who led an internal dashboard consolidating fund transactions, approvals, and reporting into a single workflow tool. Strong in full-stack delivery (React + REST APIs + DB optimization) and in scaling/cleaning messy operational data via modular ETL pipelines (Python/Node), iterating post-launch with performance improvements like caching, pagination, and enhanced filtering.”

Waldorff Villacres

Screened

Healthcare technology executive and architect with 20+ years leading enterprise platforms and digital transformation.

Seattle, Washington, USA21y exp

“Healthcare-focused founder in the R&D stage building an EHR and clinical staffing startup centered on value-based care. They have already tested the concept with the market, are engaging Medicaid/Medicare leaders and industry conferences like ViVE and HIMSS, and are focused on early-signal detection to improve patient outcomes while lowering utilization costs.”

Eugene Nelepko

Screened

Executive growth leader specializing in AI-powered SaaS, marketplaces, and e-commerce

San Francisco, CA13y exp

“Growth leader with strong zero-to-one and systems-building experience across e-commerce and retail media. Most notably, they proposed and launched a new retail media division from scratch, presold demand before product build, and scaled it to $1.5M ARR with 85% margin, while also building data-driven lifecycle and acquisition systems that materially improved activation and CAC efficiency.”

Brent Cook

Screened

Director-level product leader specializing in AI-powered search and discovery

Seattle, WA21y exp

“Former high school teacher turned product leader with deep experience in EdTech, scholarly search/discovery, and mobile content platforms. They’ve led complex end-to-end launches, including a direct-to-consumer app storefront delivered on a 7-month timeline and AI-powered research discovery features for a 5-billion-record search platform, while bringing a strong human-centered, accessibility-first perspective to AI products.”

“Frontend-leaning full-stack engineer with strong ownership in network observability and analytics products, including BT Group's SMARTS platform and SSpain.ai at Texas A&M. Stands out for building data-dense, near-real-time dashboards and shaping products end-to-end across React/Angular frontends, FastAPI backends, PostgreSQL, AWS, and even React Native mobile surfaces.”

“Backend engineer who built a containerized Flask service powering an engineering metrics dashboard by syncing GitHub and Jira data into PostgreSQL, with strong emphasis on schema design, query performance, caching, and background processing. Has hands-on experience with SaaS multi-tenancy (tenant scoping + Postgres RLS) and integrating AI/ML inference via separate model-serving services (FastAPI + TensorFlow Serving) and external APIs (OpenAI/Hugging Face/PyTorch).”

“Operations-focused leader/consultant who has built corporate teams from scratch and redesigned customer success vs. implementation workflows for scalable new-client onboarding. Uses structured operational audits (tools, contracts, process mapping) to identify redundancies and automation opportunities, then drives adoption through team buy-in. Also mentors cross-functional leaders and has been retained for post-acquisition systems integration.”

“Software engineer with Citi Bank experience building real-time fraud validation/scoring for loan processing, spanning Spring Boot microservices and a FastAPI Python service secured with OAuth2/JWT. Delivered React/TypeScript operations dashboards and deployed containerized services via Docker/Kubernetes with Jenkins CI/CD, while also tuning databases (Oracle/Postgres) and handling high-volume latency/scaling issues using ELK, caching, and autoscaling on AWS.”

“Engineering Manager/player-coach leading Data Infrastructure, ML/DS, and AI Engineering pods who recently shipped multiple production agentic GenAI features. Built privacy-preserving LLM workflows (PII redaction via Microsoft Presidio) and drove an AI expense-approval agent from ambiguous ask to GA, cutting approval time from ~2.5 days to <4 hours with >85% accuracy. Also owned a major LLM cost overrun incident and implemented cost observability plus circuit breakers to prevent runaway agent loops.”

Sai Kondapaka

Screened

Mid-Level Software Engineer specializing in microservices, data pipelines, and FinTech fraud detection

Remote, USA5y exp

“Backend engineer with PayPal experience owning a high-throughput, low-latency fraud detection pipeline processing billions of transactions/day, integrating LLM-based models into real-time Kafka streams and payment decisioning APIs. Strong Kubernetes + GitOps practitioner (declarative, auditable deployments; autoscaling/probe tuning) with migration experience modernizing legacy systems onto AKS/OpenShift.”

Sampada shelke

Screened

Mid-level Machine Learning Engineer specializing in NLP, LLMs, and applied research

La Jolla, CA3y exp

“New grad SDE (AI/ML) who built and deployed an LLM-based chatbot framework used across technology, military, and banking contexts, focusing on model selection tradeoffs (latency vs accuracy) through prototyping and benchmarking. Also built a multi-agent "eaterybot" using PyAutoGen/AutoGen with a manager agent orchestrating specialized agents, and emphasizes rigorous testing with adversarial/edge-case datasets and hallucination checks.”

Ariana Bavarian

Screened

Executive Operations Leader specializing in M&A integration and marketing/tech transformation

Chicago, IL20y exp

“Operations-focused leader who joined a consulting firm immediately after consolidating 5 companies via M&A and built standardized time tracking plus utilization analytics that became a core executive-management tool. Experienced in change management and cross-functional redesign of business systems, including simplifying an over-engineered Salesforce CRM to improve sales adoption and pipeline data integrity.”

SNEHA KUSUMA

Screened

Mid-level Java Full-Stack Developer specializing in banking and telecom platforms

Dallas, TX5y exp

“Frontend-focused engineer with experience at T-Mobile and U.S. Bank who maintained a TypeScript utility library (types, tests, build pipeline, and docs) adopted by multiple teams, and improved React workflow performance by refactoring components and optimizing data fetching. Known for pragmatic cross-team support—reproducing issues quickly, shipping well-tested fixes, and managing changes carefully to avoid breaking downstream apps.”

Navindu Jayatilake

Screened

DevOps Technical Lead specializing in Kubernetes, AWS, and platform engineering

Colombo, Sri Lanka6y exp

“Sri Lanka–based DevOps/Platform engineer focused on Kubernetes and AWS who has led real production incidents and recoveries (network-policy-induced asymmetric routing; node pool failure due to CNI upgrade). Built production CI/CD with GitHub Actions (ephemeral self-hosted runners on EKS), ArgoCD, Vault, and Terraform, and led a phased ECS-to-EKS migration including Kafka consumers and MongoDB Atlas private endpoints.”

Nadia Elinbabi

Screened

Senior Product and Systems Design Leader specializing in AI-enabled enterprise workflows

Charlotte, NC18y exp

“Former UX designer with 12 years in design who moved into product management and now leads complex AI-enabled retail experiences. Most notably, they championed Competitive Quote from an overlooked Hack Day prototype into a major initiative later valued at $300M over three years, combining strong product strategy, agentic UX thinking, and deep practical understanding of human-in-the-loop AI systems.”

“Product and UX leader with experience launching a new direct-to-consumer ecommerce channel inside an enterprise business and later optimizing it to double revenue and conversion. Also built early AI-assisted workflows in regulatory/risk software, with a strong emphasis on trust, human oversight, and adapting quickly to new domains through first-principles product thinking.”

“Product leader with 20 years of experience across startups and agencies, including leading the end-to-end rebuild of Filmik, an AI-enabled workflow platform for film and television production teams. Stands out for combining deep UX simplification instincts with human-centered AI thinking, using automation to reduce friction while preserving trust, control, and collaboration. Has also built and mentored globally distributed product, design, engineering, and delivery teams across multiple regions.”

“Product leader with strong experience in highly regulated benefits and claims environments, including building statutory benefits systems and launching AI-enabled claims automation. Stands out for navigating regulatory ambiguity, legacy/API integration, and executive alignment while still shipping on time and under budget, with a clear philosophy that AI should augment human work rather than replace it.”