Vetted Networking Professionals

Michelle Coblentz

Screened ReferencesStrong rec.

Senior Operations & Business Process Consultant specializing in change management and quality systems

Fort Myers, FL20y exp

“Operations and quality systems advisor who helps early-stage companies professionalize quickly—implementing ISO 9001-aligned document/vendor management, SOPs, and contracts while coaching founders through change. Has driven measurable process improvements across manufacturing and healthcare/clinical operations, including escalating a nurse productivity issue into a CAPA/IT fix that improved workflows for hundreds of nurses. Known as a cross-functional "Connector" who blends strategic guidance with hands-on execution and human-centered design.”

“Current CTO of an analytics company in the eye industry that was acquired by a larger organization, and now exploring building a new analytics platform for individual provider offices. Focused on helping practices grow revenue and improve the patient journey to drive long-term retention, with entrepreneurial motivation tied to building a legacy business for their family.”

Mark Thomas

Screened ReferencesStrong rec.

Director-level software architect specializing in cloud, distributed systems, and healthcare IT

McCalla, AL20y exp

“Startup veteran with experience at seven companies since 2004 and direct exposure to Birmingham's Innovation Depot accelerator through three different startups. Has worked closely with investment teams on MVPs and pitch decks and brings a pragmatic lens to evaluating ventures through need, margins, burn rate, cash position, and sales growth strategy.”

“Unity/C# engineer with hands-on experience building cross-platform VR/mobile prototypes at Verizon Labs, including a networked VR cinema and virtual office application. Particularly strong in performance engineering: they describe custom update architecture, shader work, and low-level iOS optimization that enabled 60 FPS while rendering HD video textures and running voice chat simultaneously. They also bring adjacent computer vision integration experience from Nomad-Go, with a practical focus on latency, inference/render separation, and data consistency.”

Joshua Smith

Screened ReferencesStrong rec.

Executive engineering leader specializing in AI automation and enterprise transformation

Banks, OR23y exp

“Technology leader with deep accelerator and zero-to-one product experience across the Department of Defense, Fortune 100 enterprises, academia, and GovTech. Most notably, they built a seven-tier solution that generated over $10M in first-year savings and was adopted by 300+ DoD organizations, positioning them as a strong CTO-type operator for mission-driven startups and complex enterprises.”

“Data engineer in healthcare (HCA) who owned end-to-end Azure-based pipelines at very large scale (50M+ daily claims/patient records). Strong focus on reliability: schema-drift fail-fast validation, quarantine layers, and Python/SQL data quality checks that reduced issues ~25%, plus performance tuning in Databricks/PySpark and versioned serving in Synapse for downstream consumers.”

Ashley Borges

Screened

Senior Solutions Engineer specializing in mobile SDK integrations and AdTech

Alameda, CA13y exp

“Customer-facing technical professional with hands-on ad tech experience enabling a non-SDK header-bidding integration by analyzing APIs/SDK behavior, documenting end-to-end requirements, and guiding the customer through release. Strong at tailoring technical demos for mixed executive/engineering audiences and partnering with sales on metrics-driven launches and beta rollouts. No direct on-the-job LLM/agentic systems experience yet, but interested in moving into that space.”

Ishwari Kulkarni

Screened

Intern IT & Data Analytics professional specializing in automation, cloud operations, and dashboards

Dallas, TX2y exp

“AppSec-focused engineer with experience spanning Accenture and a digital operations support internship, emphasizing secure SDLC and CI/CD security automation (SAST/DAST/SCA). Has hands-on troubleshooting experience using logs/metrics/APM traces (e.g., resolving DAST timeouts caused by rate limiting) and designs AWS/Kubernetes scanning integrations with least-privilege IAM, private networking, secrets management, and observability.”

Chad Kilgore

Screened

Senior Technical Designer specializing in gameplay systems, tools, and VR/AAA pipelines

Bellevue, WA17y exp

“Game/technical designer with live-service ownership at Wargaming (World of Tanks) driving KPI-based monthly events and engagement loops via data-informed reward tuning. Recently shipped Batman Arkham Shadow by automating a narrative pipeline that converted script-graph dialogue into a string library, cutting weeks of work down to hours under aggressive deadlines. Experienced rapid prototyping in UE4 (including AI-driven mode logic) and cross-functional alignment practices.”

“Unity/VR developer and PhD researcher who served as lead developer on a clinical VR application (VheaRts) used by surgeons at Great Ormond Street Hospital, taking over a messy codebase and rebuilding its architecture, documentation, and extensibility. Also built research-focused Unity VR experiments (e.g., change blindness in a dynamic living room) with sophisticated logic to control participant attention while monitoring physiological cues.”

“Recruiting leader with 15 years of people management experience (up to 10 recruiters) and deep, hands-on executive search background from 5+ years at Samsung, supporting four SVPs and filling roles up to VP level. Known for streamlining complex hiring processes—cut Samsung’s 100+ page recruiting SOP and overall process roughly in half—resulting in a significant drop in time-to-fill and improved stakeholder satisfaction.”

“Enterprise IT operations and identity governance professional (Atlassian) who partners closely with security teams to reduce risk through RBAC/Conditional Access automation, endpoint compliance, and vulnerability remediation workflows. Demonstrated ability to balance strict security controls with engineering productivity via phased rollouts, pilots, and KPI-driven stakeholder alignment, plus hands-on troubleshooting of complex Azure AD authentication failures and secure AWS integration design.”

UMESH KAMISETTY

Screened

Mid-level Data Engineer specializing in cloud lakehouse and streaming platforms

Seattle, WA5y exp

“Data engineer focused on building production-grade pipelines on AWS (Kafka/Kinesis/Glue/S3) through to curated serving layers in Snowflake and Delta Lake. Emphasizes automated data quality validation (PySpark + CI/CD), modular dbt transformations for analytics (customer spending, risk metrics), and operational reliability with CloudWatch and DLQs; data consumed by BI tools and ML pipelines for fraud detection and risk analytics.”

Mukundan Sridharan

Screened

Executive Technology Leader (CTO) specializing in IoT sensing, AI/ML, and RF/embedded systems

Rockville, MD22y exp

“Currently a startup CTO who thrives on building new technology stacks and rapidly turning technical ideas into products. Interested in partnering with a CEO/business team to commercialize embedded/edge concepts such as multi-sensor drone localization (video/audio/RF with SDR), low-cost solar+battery power nodes networked via LoRa, and an Amazon Sidewalk/LoRa connectivity device with cloud management.”

Hamza Ahmed

Screened

Entry-Level Software Engineer and Full-Stack Developer

Fremont, CA1y exp

“Generalist troubleshooter with experience debugging across C (memory leaks with Valgrind), Python (bug tracing to meet deadlines), and VHDL (hardware-related issues), plus some exposure to production deployments and networking issue resolution. Has supported customers remotely and emphasizes calm, patient communication during incident resolution.”

Jake Lee

Screened

Junior Full-Stack/Systems Engineer specializing in AI, embedded systems, and healthcare apps

Boston, MA3y exp

“Led architecture for “Solstice/Solstis,” a safety-aware, hands-free AI medical assistant that guides users through minor emergencies with a structured, state-machine-driven LLM agent integrated with device hardware. Built RAG grounded in Red Cross procedures plus guardrails, fallbacks, and emergency escalation, and improved real-world usability by shifting from open-ended chat to a deterministic step-by-step workflow measured via completion rate, repeat prompts, and latency.”

“Patent attorney with a biomedical engineering background seeking to transition into investing/scouting for emerging technology startups. Brings strong IP analysis, technical fluency, and a demonstrated ability to build professional networks from scratch, including creating new employer partnerships and launching a recurring multi-employer networking event in law school.”

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.”

“Full-stack product engineer with hands-on experience building a React/serverless/SQL e-commerce platform for Haagen-Dazs and improving consumer UX in a location-based animal discovery app. Stands out for pairing strong technical fundamentals—component architecture, SQL performance tuning, reusable primitives—with measurable product outcomes like 40% more completed orders, 25% customer growth, 95% navigation accuracy, and 20% fewer device malfunctions.”

“Cloud/Kubernetes-focused production engineer with experience running 99.95% uptime platforms across AWS/Azure/GCP. Strong in incident response and performance troubleshooting (including a 30% MTTR reduction), and in building secure CI/CD and Terraform-based IaC for AKS/GKE microservices with robust change controls and rollback practices. Notably does not have direct IBM Power/AIX/VIOS/HMC or PowerHA/HACMP ownership.”