Vetted Mentoring Professionals

Scott Knight

Screened

Director-level software engineering leader specializing in SaaS and Healthcare IT

Portland, OR23y exp

“Candidate is exploring startup ideas focused on SaaS tools for small and medium-sized businesses, especially IT and HR automation. They have prior experience in VC-backed companies and with accelerators, and stand out for emphasizing real customer feedback and prototyping over echo-chamber startup advice.”

“Outbound-focused candidate coming from a Cushman & Wakefield internship where they built pipeline by prospecting potential office tenants through email, calls, and LinkedIn. They stand out for signal-based, highly personalized outreach to mid-market and enterprise stakeholders, with experience generating 2-4 qualified tours per week and thinking like a founding SDR around ICP design, account tiering, and repeatable cadence building.”

“Senior healthcare sales leader with large-scale ownership in Medicare, Medicaid, and managed long-term care, including leadership of a 165-person team and a $4M budget at VNSNY CHOICE. Stands out for driving compliant growth in heavily regulated government programs, more than doubling targets through cross-referral and incentive programs, and leading expansion across 23 New York counties.”

“Senior edtech product leader with nearly 20 years of experience who owned CCL's primary digital platform across strategy, execution, hiring, and operations. Most notably, they transformed a digital content delivery need into a licensing business that became the fastest-growing and highest-margin line in company history, while also shipping human-centered AI learning features and consolidating legacy tools into a unified platform.”

Brad Anderson

Screened

Executive product leader specializing in FinTech, SaaS, and digital transformation

Texas, USA23y exp

“Product leader with experience spanning telecom, fintech mortgage, and hospitality, including a major AT&T rebuild of a fragmented digital sales flow and AI-enabled lending/onboarding products. Brings a strong mix of legacy modernization, cross-functional alignment, UX iteration, and human-centered thinking about AI as an amplifier rather than a replacement.”

“Director-level product leader with experience spanning SaaS platform rebuilds, pricing strategy, and AI-native workflow design. At Skykit, they led a major self-serve/PLG account management transformation across multiple teams, and they also built an AI sales quoting tool using a multi-stage RAG pipeline that reached 100% quote accuracy in user testing.”

“Marketing creative/designer with a portfolio at https://billrodella.com who claims end-to-end ownership of design work. Mentions building a Figma design system for a major dental brand and producing lightweight marketing videos using Adobe Creative Cloud and Final Cut Pro; targets $125k+ base.”

“Backend/data engineer who built a production-ready multi-agent financial intelligence system (Mycroft) that orchestrates specialized AI agents to analyze real-time market data using FastAPI and Pinecone vector search. Brings strong security/reliability instincts (rate limiting, JWT/OAuth2, retries/backoff, health checks) and has caught high-impact data integrity issues in financial migrations (timezone normalization across global legacy systems).”

“Backend-leaning full-stack engineer from Valcom who maintained Django/PostgreSQL services for mass-notification/paging servers used by education/commercial/government customers. Notable for hardening authentication and reliability (JWT refresh + rotation tokens, WebSockets/EventStream) and for modernizing a legacy Ext.js/PHP stack into a React + Django architecture with strong CI/testing and production incident ownership.”

“Cross-functional operator at Andium who led founder-level initiatives spanning next-gen product launch + legacy sunset, built decision-driven operating cadences (dashboards, memos, blocker tracking), and drove international expansion after a Series B led by Saudi Aramco. Also supported a $6M strategic opportunity in Australia by coordinating pricing, product feedback loops, and internal alignment across an AI-enabled SaaS + hardware business.”

“Built and operated an end-to-end customer-facing "Record Platform" web product as both engineer and primary user, focusing on reliability and correctness in core flows like search and checkout. Implemented a TypeScript/React frontend with a multi-service backend and Kafka-based event-driven architecture, and created internal tooling to automate risky ops like Kubernetes TLS certificate rotation with k6 load/chaos testing (including HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 validation).”

“ML/NLP engineer (Beyond Identity) who built production semantic search and entity-resolution systems over internal security documentation, using LDA + BERT embeddings with FAISS/Pinecone to cut search time by 30%. Also scaled a real-time anomaly detection pipeline to millions of events/day with Spark and AWS Lambda, with strong emphasis on measurable validation (Precision@k, MRR, F1, ARI).”

Ivaylo Ivanov

Screened

Senior Unity Engineer specializing in XR and real-time 3D applications

5y exp

“Unity lead developer/project manager who builds VR storytelling and training simulator experiences, including hand-tracking-driven interactions and custom rendering (Shader Graph, forward rendering, occlusion culling). Created an educational Unity game (Bed Time Hunter) spanning gameplay, VFX/shaders, terrain/lighting, and Photon multiplayer, and built a VR office simulator that targets both Quest standalone and SteamVR while streaming cloud IoT sensor data.”

Dominique Jackson

Screened

Director-level Sports & Youth Development Leader specializing in athletic program operations

Baltimore, MD6y exp

“Former Division III college football coach with extensive experience supporting collegiate and professional athletes, including work with Under Armour athletes (e.g., Kelsey Plum, Steph Curry) and Baltimore Ravens player engagement. While not hockey-specific, they emphasize end-to-end athlete guidance (goal-setting, transparency, family support) plus social media/profile-building to increase athlete visibility.”

Uday Dorawala

Screened

Director-level Engineering Leader specializing in SaaS platforms, data, and cloud modernization

Raleigh, NC25y exp

“Former founder with an acquired venture who later led R&D at McClatchy and joined multiple startups. Identified a major client need and built a mobile app platform using ML and AR for home builders, driving adoption by dozens of customers and $1M+ ARR. Strong hands-on builder who can architect MVPs, iterate quickly with A/B testing and user feedback, and scale early engineering teams and culture.”

Gabriel Fagundes

Screened

Mid-level AI/ML & Backend Engineer specializing in AI platforms and computer vision

New York, New York6y exp

“Backend engineer with hands-on experience building real-time, low-latency systems: owned the Python backend for a real-time crowd-monitoring product (top 5% at HackHarvard 2025) using OpenCV, GPU YOLO inference (PyTorch), WebRTC, and OAuth. Also has production Kubernetes/GitOps experience (Helm/Kustomize, GitHub Actions, Argo CD), Kafka-based event pipelines, and executed a minimal-downtime on-prem PostgreSQL migration to AWS EC2.”

“Aspiring founder with hands-on experience helping small businesses with market research and business plan development, and prior work evaluating feasibility of various business ideas. Familiar with the VC/studio/accelerator ecosystem (though not currently active day-to-day) and strongly motivated by autonomy, learning, and building something new.”

Rambabu Dhanavath

Screened

Mid-level Software Engineer specializing in backend and cloud-native microservices

United States5y exp

“Backend/cloud engineer with 5 years of experience who has shipped a production internal ops LLM assistant end-to-end using Spring Boot microservices on AWS. Stands out for designing controlled, safety-first agent orchestration with deterministic tool access, Redis/DB-backed recoverable state, and strong observability/evaluation practices to improve reliability in production.”

“Founding product leader at Vergent who built out a 6-person product team and led a major modernization of a 16-year-old platform, collapsing 20+ legacy screens into configurable workflows and shipping a year ahead of schedule. Also shipped AI products in lending, including computer-vision-based document validation/parsing and ML for first-payment-default prediction, with a human-in-the-loop rollout strategy.”

“Backend/platform engineer with production experience building a Python SDK over a microservices ecosystem, emphasizing reliability (JWT auth, retries/timeouts, custom exceptions) and integration testing. Has delivered AWS EKS microservices with Jenkins+Helm CI/CD, strong secrets/config separation using AWS Secrets Manager, and set up Datadog APM/deployment/change monitoring. Also modernized legacy VB applications to C#/.NET WPF via incremental migration with parity testing and stakeholder sign-off.”

“Software engineer with hands-on experience building and maintaining a React accessibility utility/component library (open-source-style) used across university portals, emphasizing WCAG 2.2 compliance, robust focus/keyboard behavior, and Jest/React Testing Library coverage. Also built and maintained .NET Core microservices at the Florida Department of Transportation, including integrating AI-driven features, with strong ownership around observability, incident response, and performance-focused refactoring.”

“Built and deployed a production RAG-based AI assistant for sales reps to unify access to product info, pricing, and internal documents across multiple systems. Implemented ETL pipelines for normalization/chunking/embeddings, integrated the assistant into internal React/TypeScript UIs with user-specific context, and enforced security with private vector storage and permission-filtered retrieval.”