Vetted Microservices Architecture Professionals

Thazim Banu Shaffee

Screened ReferencesStrong rec.

Engineering Manager specializing in payments, risk, and high-scale distributed systems

San Jose, CA14y exp

“Engineering leader/player-coach on a risk core transaction platform (payments/branded checkout) who led major migrations from a monolithic stack to microservices, including API contract redesign and performance improvements (reported ~500ms latency reduction). Experienced running high-stakes production incidents (upgrade-related outage/degradation) end-to-end with RCA and rollout-process changes, and has accelerated delivery via documentation/tooling (audit sign-off cycle reduced from ~3 sprints to ~1).”

Jared Alessandroni

Screened ReferencesStrong rec.

Executive CTO specializing in AI, cloud platforms, and scaling SaaS products

21y exp

“NYC-based startup founder/CTO who sold products to Omnicom and Sprinklr, then built an AI-powered cultural insights engine inside Omnicom using AWS Lambda + ML to process ~1M items/day and reached ~$1MM ARR in year one. Former senior leader at Sprinklr managing 200+ people globally, delivering enterprise martech solutions with SLAs and high-reliability social data pipelines (Twitter firehose).”

“Senior software engineering leader with 20+ years of management exposure who has alternated between IC and director-level roles, leading teams of up to 25 across AI platform, analytics, Salesforce, and systems software projects. Particularly compelling for roles needing both technical depth and organizational leadership: they have architected systems themselves, built teams in new geographies, and coordinated platform, AI/data, and consumer engineering groups to deliver successful turnkey AI solutions.”

“Backend engineer who scaled a food delivery platform by migrating from a single-service architecture to Spring Cloud microservices with an API gateway and Kafka-based event-driven order pipeline. Reported outcomes include ~50% latency reduction, stable ~2K RPS throughput, and 99.8% uptime, with strong emphasis on safe migrations (dual writes, canaries, schema versioning) and security (JWT/RBAC/Postgres RLS).”

George Liu

Screened

Intern Software Engineer specializing in full-stack, backend, and AI agent systems

Fremont, CA1y exp

“Backend engineer with Tesla experience who redesigned vehicle registration into a step-based, region-configured workflow across 4–5 microservices, enabling partial saves and reducing customer drop-off. Has hands-on experience scaling and securing Python/FastAPI APIs (OAuth2/JWT, CORS), migrating cold data from MySQL to MongoDB via Kubernetes CronJobs, and implementing RBAC/RLS with Supabase + Postgres.”

Sona Petrosyan

Screened

Director-level Engineering Leader specializing in Identity & Access Management

San Ramon, CA20y exp

“Senior engineering leader with 20+ years of experience spanning hands-on engineering and 7+ years of management across startups and enterprise, including Salesforce/MuleSoft, Airbnb, and Insightly. Particularly strong in platform security and IAM, with a track record of leading high-scale foundational services, simplifying complex cross-platform trust models, and driving security-critical migrations across dozens of teams.”

“Backend/data engineer with hands-on production experience across GCP (FastAPI microservices on Kubernetes) and AWS (Lambda, ECS Fargate, Glue). Has modernized legacy SAS batch systems into Python services with parallel-run parity validation, and has strong operational rigor in ETL reliability/monitoring plus proven SQL tuning impact (25s to <300ms, ~60% CPU reduction).”

“Backend/data engineer with healthcare/telehealth domain experience, building patient appointment and data-processing systems on AWS. Has delivered production microservices and ETL pipelines (Flask/Celery, Glue/PySpark) with strong reliability/observability practices (JWT, retries/timeouts, Sentry/CloudWatch) and modernization experience migrating SAS workflows to Python services, including a documented 10min→30sec SQL performance win.”

“Backend/AI engineer who built a production GPU-backed real-time inference API at Nvidia and debugged burst-induced tail latency, cutting P95 by ~29% through dynamic batching and backpressure. Also shipped an end-to-end RAG + agentic operational diagnostics assistant with strict tool controls, evidence citation, confidence gating, and strong production guardrails, plus demonstrated hands-on Postgres optimization (900ms to 40–60ms).”

Pankaj Goyal

Screened

Director-level Engineering Leader specializing in FinTech, IAM, and AI/ML platforms

SF Bay Area, CA22y exp

“Player-coach backend leader at PostLo who led a major backend architecture upgrade to enable AI-driven features by separating transactional systems from AI workloads (vector embeddings/image validation) and adding async processing for heavy jobs. Also owned production reliability improvements (query/index optimization, workload isolation, monitoring and load testing) and translated an ambiguous retention goal into a shipped cashback rewards feature with auditable transactions.”

Jeff Otchis

Screened

Director-level Product Management leader specializing in B2B cybersecurity and enterprise SaaS

Austin, TX24y exp

“Enterprise B2B go-to-market and product marketing leader with experience at Compaq, HP, Dell, Forcepoint, and AT&T/LevelBlue, spanning cybersecurity and OEM businesses. Stands out for building a unified GTM motion across four merged companies at Forcepoint and for driving measurable growth through vertical marketing and sales enablement, including $25M and $10M revenue impacts in separate roles.”

“CMU engineer with hands-on experience building full-stack AI products across internships and academic projects, including a Microsoft real-time multimodal assistant and a Cursor-like coding agent. Stands out for combining low-latency systems engineering with strong product instincts, shipping AI tools that improved latency by 35%, cut grading time from five days to under 10 minutes, and reduced user resubmissions by 45%.”