Vetted Mentorship Professionals

Shady Alzayat

Screened

Executive engineering leader and full-stack builder specializing in platforms, payments, and healthcare

San Francisco, CA20y exp

“Serial entrepreneur building appetier.com, an agentic restaurant marketing and ecommerce automation platform for restaurants. Previously raised for Atlas Mental Health and brings thoughtful fundraising perspective centered on investor alignment, GTM partnership, and vertical SaaS/SMB infrastructure expertise.”

“Infrastructure/Platform-focused engineering leader who led a large-scale AWS modernization, standardizing Terraform IaC and embedding security/policy validation into CI/CD to reduce drift and improve auditability. Also delivered data reliability improvements by incrementally migrating key integrations to an event-driven Kafka model with DLQs and lag monitoring, and has hands-on incident leadership using observability tooling (New Relic).”

Aakanksha Desai

Screened

Junior Full-Stack Software Engineer specializing in React, Kubernetes, and AI-powered apps

Scottsdale, Arizona2y exp

“Backend/DevOps-leaning engineer managing multiple customer service platforms end-to-end (requirements through deployment). Built an in-house Python monitoring/alerting solution for Salesforce-to-Java contact sync jobs (Snowflake dependencies) that increased uptime ~60%, and helped modernize delivery by moving the team from manual releases to automated Jenkins-based deployments while coordinating an Oracle EBS→Fusion transition with business/data/IT stakeholders.”

EMMANUEL ETIENNE

Screened

Engineering Manager specializing in FinTech money movement and AI-driven infrastructure

Brooklyn, NY12y exp

“Player-coach fintech engineer/engineering lead who built a deterministic payer-ID wire reconciliation system with Citi, including idempotent ingestion and webhook processing across Ruby and Go, materially reducing accounting manual work. Experienced in incident response (Plaid-related customer-impacting issue), stakeholder-driven MVP scoping for ACH status visibility, and delivery acceleration via infrastructure templating (EC2) and standardized Magento project setups.”

“Unity VR programmer with multiple shipped Meta Quest titles (including Lead Programmer on Infinite Inside), spanning core architecture, interactions, Addressables, and localization. Also independently designed/programmed/directed the commercial Steam release Zellige: The Tilemaker of Granada, managing a 10-person team and earning positive coverage from Rock Paper Shotgun.”

“Former Cloud Engineer at Indivior (laid off in January) now focused on entrepreneurship; owns multiple businesses including a SaaS product with iOS and Android apps (strive.gifts). Has not raised funding yet and is considering raising working capital to hire full-time backend and UX/UI developers.”

“Unity/C# developer focused on Meta Quest VR simulations and indie game development; built a factory onboarding VR experience largely solo, including modular scenario orchestration, interaction systems, and branching NPC dialogue. Also created multiple Unity games in the last year and built reusable internal packages (game management + UI/screens), while using an AI-driven pipeline for rapid prototyping and 3D asset generation.”

Yves Desjardins

Screened

Mid-Level Software Engineer specializing in front-end web applications

Vancouver, BC6y exp

“Frontend engineer who led Later’s end-to-end “Social listening” product build, driving architecture decisions through close collaboration with product, design, and backend. Also spearheaded a staged JS-to-TS migration by running knowledge-transfer and pair-programming sessions, and ships quickly with CI/CD, feature flags, and strong automated testing practices.”

Leonard Payne

Screened

Senior Performance Marketing Leader specializing in paid media, lifecycle/CRM, and analytics

Detroit, MI23y exp

“Performance marketer managing high-spend, multi-platform paid media for major brands (e.g., Navistar, Buick), with end-to-end ownership from strategy to reporting. Uses multivariate testing and trend-based budget reallocations to drive measurable lifts (27–60% KPI improvements) and significant outperformance (2.8x vs forecast), and has experience removing conversion friction by replacing lead forms with landing page + chat-based flows.”

Manali Patil

Screened

Senior Software Engineer & Engineering Manager specializing in cloud backend and manufacturing MES

Santa Clara, CA9y exp

“Customer-facing engineer who led recurring midnight ERP data-feed/B2B integrations from prototype to production, building reusable APIs and using Hangfire for job scheduling. Known for tight weekly customer iteration, strong documentation and test coverage (80%+), and cross-functional problem-solving with Operations/Quality/NPI to resolve data-collection and manufacturing-process constraints; has 2 customers live on the integration.”

“Built the US market for Karya in an ambiguous zero-base environment, creating a repeatable outbound playbook for spice buyers, importers, and food manufacturers. Combines HubSpot, Salesforce, and Claude to run highly personalized, high-volume outreach; recently turned 200+ post-event emails into 10 online and 2 in-person meetings in 2 days, and says their accounts now represent around 40% of company revenue.”

“Backend/data engineer focused on production Python and AWS: built FastAPI REST services and a containerized ECS Fargate + Lambda architecture deployed via Terraform/CI-CD. Strong in data engineering (Glue/S3/Parquet/RDS) and operational reliability (CloudWatch/SNS, retries, schema-evolution handling), with experience modernizing legacy SAS reporting into Python microservices using feature flags and parity validation.”

“Full-stack/AI engineer who has shipped production systems spanning real-time analytics dashboards and an internal LLM-powered knowledge assistant. Experienced with RAG pipelines (embeddings/vector DB, semantic retrieval, query rewriting) plus evaluation loops and guardrails, and builds observable Kafka-based data pipelines monitored with Prometheus/Grafana.”

“Frontend engineer who led Bentley’s flagship design system from a greenfield codebase to adoption across every major Bentley product, emphasizing maintainability and high UX polish. Built complex React+TypeScript interfaces like a Figma/Photoshop-style layers tree, applying advanced performance techniques (skeleton-first loading, transitions, memoization, deferred rendering) and iterative feature-flagged rollouts driven by user feedback.”

Umair Khokhar

Screened

Director-level Engineering Leader specializing in AI Platforms for Enterprise B2B SaaS

San Francisco, CA15y exp

“Technical leader/player-coach who architected and shipped an end-to-end computer vision pricing system for a major North American auto seller, using Go + Ray + AWS SageMaker in a low-latency distributed inference architecture. Strong in production governance (logs/tracing/guardrails/AppSec), reliability incident ownership (DNS limits affecting 20% traffic), and measurable delivery acceleration (deployment cycle 16→4 days; delivery speed 5→2 days) through process optimization and AI-assisted enablement.”

Arunima Mishra

Screened

Senior Technical Product Lead specializing in Data Governance and MDM SaaS platforms

Bengaluru, India7y exp

“Technical/product lead at Albanero (acquired by Infor in 2024; now at Infor) who built a Data Mesh-focused “Governance as a Product” module from early persona-based policies through a highly configurable multi-ERP governance platform (MDM, multi-source mastering, match/merge, automated review workflows). Also troubleshoots agentic/LLM workflows in production using auditability, guardrails, monitoring, and real-time validation—fixing a P0 false-positive security flagging issue and contributing to significant deal/adoption growth (~50%) after V2 launch.”

“Executive/engineering leader with 18+ years at an established company who helped turn a top-3 telco data opportunity into meaningful revenue and a continuing partnership to launch new data-driven products. Brings a security/privacy-first approach (compliance assessments and documentation) and a structured North Star + technical planning method for building with limited resources; interested in joining an early-stage founding journey with the right vision and team.”