Vetted Mentoring Professionals

Paul Kasinski

Screened ReferencesStrong rec.

Executive CIO/CTO specializing in enterprise transformation across retail, e-commerce, and AI

Santa Monica, CA17y exp

“Senior technology executive (CTO/SVP Technology, also board member) with experience modernizing legacy environments and scaling teams in high-growth and PE-owned contexts. Architected a standardized enterprise platform (ERP/WMS/CRM/POS/eComm/DWH/BI/integration) to rapidly migrate acquisitions—moving 7 companies in under 3 years and cutting migration timelines ~4x—while also driving major org redesign and hiring acceleration (30+ hires in 6 months).”

Peter Gluck

Screened ReferencesStrong rec.

Principal Software Engineer specializing in scalable, secure multi-platform systems

La Crescenta, CA14y exp

“Engineering leader and former CTO/Disney|ABC engineering manager who built white-label mobile app architecture that supported a branded app and successful exit, and later scaled Disney Channel brand app teams across iOS/Android/web and major OTT platforms. Led kid-safety architecture for DisneyNOW (“Junior mode” with PIN) and partnered with product/legal on COPPA compliance, emphasizing maintainable tech choices and strong execution processes.”

“Healthcare product leader with deep oncology and pharma experience who has built both foundational clinical data platforms and AI-powered patient engagement workflows. Particularly notable for combining rigorous data standardization, LLM evaluation/guardrail design, and human-centered communication changes that drove measurable medication refill and adherence improvements. Also teaches AI to product managers and business analysts, bringing a pragmatic, education-first view of human-centered AI adoption.”

“Senior infrastructure/platform engineer with deep IBM Power/AIX (Power9, VIOS, HMC, LPAR/DLPAR) and PowerHA production ownership at scale (40 frames / ~300 LPARs), including hands-on outage recovery and performance tuning. Also delivers modern DevOps/IaC capabilities—CI/CD for Kubernetes microservices and Terraform-based multi-account AWS (EKS/VPC/IAM/RDS) with drift detection and safe rollout controls.”

Joshua Seiden

Screened ReferencesStrong rec.

Executive Technology & Product Leader specializing in emerging tech commercialization

Centennial, Colorado33y exp

“Startup operations/product advisor and long-time accelerator mentor who has helped multiple early-stage companies become enterprise-ready—shifting teams to customer-driven roadmaps and implementing CI/Agile delivery processes. Notably supported an Israeli company in landing a Fortune 30 customer before it later IPO’d on NASDAQ, and helped an Australian startup operationalize delivery to secure deployment with a major telecom and sports league.”

“Engineering leader and hands-on architect from Sony Pictures Entertainment who has led large-scale platform modernization, digital supply chain delivery, and multiple GenAI/RAG initiatives in media and rights-management domains. Notable for combining people leadership with deep AWS/LLM architecture work, including a 1M+ record GenAI title search system and AI-driven contract insights that reportedly helped unlock a 20% revenue increase.”

Madhurya Taneja

Screened

Mid-level strategy consultant specializing in private equity and investing

Delhi, India5y exp

“Candidate appears to operate at the intersection of founder sourcing, early-stage company evaluation, and hands-on growth support. They combine investor-style discovery with practical execution—using tools like PitchBook, Crunchbase, Notion, and Airtable, and have examples spanning AI/robotics and fintech where cold outreach led to founder relationships, customer opportunities, and marketing initiatives.”

Shahla Almasri-Hafez

Screened

Director-level Engineering Leader specializing in mobile platforms and digital transformation

Remote, USA20y exp

“Mobile engineering leader who built Glassdoor's mobile org from 5 to 35 engineers while overseeing both iOS and Android. Started as a lead iOS engineer at CVS Health, moved into management, and combines hands-on technical depth with org building, talent development, and customer-driven product prioritization.”

“Built a production LLM-powered root cause analysis agent for supply chain alerts that helped operations managers avoid manual dashboard investigation. Demonstrates unusually strong depth in agent reliability, orchestration, and observability, with concrete production practices like hallucination blocking, shadow testing on 500 cases, and data-driven improvements that raised user agreement to 94% while cutting GPT-4 usage by 60%.”

“Backend-focused engineer with Walmart Global Tech experience building shipment and seller workflow systems using Spring Boot, GraphQL, Kafka, and async processing. Stands out for improving bulk label API performance by 60-75%, designing item-level partial-failure workflows that improved user clarity, and also exploring AI-powered debugging/RCA platforms with Java, Python, LangChain, and LLM integrations.”

“Veteran product leader with major enterprise impact across Cisco and Oracle NetSuite, including leading a broadband platform that grew to over $1B in annual revenue and driving AI/ML initiatives that doubled ARR. Particularly strong in customer-informed product strategy, cross-functional alignment, service model redesign, and human-centered AI applications.”

“Product leader with experience at Citi and Walmart, spanning AI-powered digital banking personalization and large-scale workforce technology. Stands out for combining strong ML product judgment, governance in regulated environments, and a human-centered approach to AI that emphasizes trust, relevance, and better user outcomes.”

“AWS Software Development Manager leading globally deployed, production-critical DDoS protection (L3/L4) across AWS. Known for scaling teams and driving cross-org tiger-team initiatives from concept through worldwide rollout, including performance-focused Python architecture changes and a major JDK 8→21 migration while maintaining strict backward compatibility. Also led an internal SDK-like integration framework improving APIs, documentation, and onboarding for major AWS service teams.”

“Talent Acquisition leader in professional services/consulting who has led national experienced hire and campus recruiting teams at scale (up to ~40 recruiters). Known for data-driven recruiting strategy—cut a campus school roster by ~60% based on ROI analysis, expanded virtual sourcing, and reduced spend—plus executive-facing workforce planning, talent model redesign, and interview process modernization (virtual, pre-recorded, psychometrics).”

Sanket Patel

Screened

Director-level Front-End Engineering Leader specializing in scalable web and mobile apps

Palo Alto, CA17y exp

“Amazon engineer/leader who drove a major modernization of the AWS Database Migration Service Console, migrating a monolithic UI to a micro-frontend architecture while improving performance, reliability, and engineering standards. Operates as a player-coach (80/20 hands-on/management), with demonstrated incident ownership and process improvements across Amazon and Walmart Labs.”

“Full-desk recruiter with experience at Meta supporting the AR Glasses org, including a difficult Staff-level ML Engineer search. Uses competitor mapping (e.g., Snap/Microsoft/Google/Apple) and multi-channel passive sourcing (LinkedIn Recruiter, SeekOut, GitHub, Quora, network) while running a metrics-driven cadence with hiring managers and strong candidate advocacy.”

Jun Ouyang

Screened

Principal Software Engineer / Tech Lead specializing in distributed systems, payments, and reliability

San Francisco, CA20y exp

“Backend engineer with DoorDash experience building production-critical systems spanning LLM-based real-time safety moderation (SendBird callbacks + ChatGPT risk scoring with automated actions) and large-scale payments data pipelines (Kafka to CockroachDB with aggregation APIs). Also led cross-team reliability work to standardize SLOs and drove an incident redesign from batch pull to real-time push callbacks to eliminate critical-event latency.”

“Engineering leader with a mix of large-scale platform experience at Microsoft and product/customer-facing work across GM, Panasonic, Acuity, and other environments. Stands out for combining people leadership with hands-on depth in accessibility, web performance at 120M+ MAU scale, and cross-functional delivery spanning enterprise permissions, e-commerce, AI, and automotive systems.”