Vetted Observability 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).”

“McKinsey practitioner who built and deployed production LLM systems for consultants/clients, including a Power BI-integrated multi-agent chatbot (RAG + text-to-SQL + formatting) with custom Python orchestration, verification loops, and a 100+ case eval set achieving ~95% consistency. Also delivered a taxonomy-mapper agent that standardized inconsistent labeling for C-suite stakeholders, cutting a process from >2 weeks to <30 minutes through demos and business-focused communication.”

“Built a production LLM-powered data ingestion workflow at Provi, an online alcohol marketplace, to clean and match millions of distributor inventory items against a product catalog. Their experience is strongest in applying LLMs to real-world, large-scale data operations with AWS Glue, S3, batching, API integration, human review, and drift detection.”

“Backend/data engineer with experience at AWS and Intuit building and operating production serverless systems and data pipelines. Delivered an internal AWS TV video-processing platform using Step Functions/Lambda/S3/DynamoDB with strong reliability and cost controls, and built Glue-based ETL for compliance/risk events (Kafka to partitioned Parquet). Also modernized legacy compliance systems into Java/Node event-driven services and has demonstrated measurable SQL tuning impact (200s to 20s).”

“Solutions/implementation-focused engineer with payments expertise (Adyen headless Magento integrations, 3DS components) who also builds and troubleshoots agentic LLM workflows using the OpenAI Agents SDK. Experienced in pre-sales technical validation and in tailoring live demos/workshops—e.g., pivoted a Quantum Metric workshop from custom JavaScript instrumentation to no-code analytics based on audience needs.”

“Platform/backend engineer focused on Kubernetes at scale: built a Java control-plane service for multi-region cluster provisioning/monitoring/upgrades using Kafka-driven async workers, and solved peak-load provisioning failures by eliminating blocking I/O and dynamically scaling consumers. Also shipped an LLM-assisted Kubernetes troubleshooting/remediation feature that pulls Prometheus logs/metrics into prompts and uses guardrails (confidence thresholds + human-in-the-loop) to prevent risky actions.”

“CTO-focused candidate with experience at foundations evaluating startups, including reviewing technical architectures and coaching teams to refine ideas for better platform fit and synergies. Prioritizes company culture and integrity when choosing leadership roles.”

“Robotics/ML engineer with internship experience at Valeo building a deep-learning prototype to replace parts of a legacy SLAM backend for autonomous parking, focused on making models run reliably in real time on embedded hardware (quantization/distillation + TensorRT). Also brings strong MLOps/deployment experience (Docker, Kubernetes on AWS EKS, CI via GitHub Actions) and has supported patent filing by explaining the technical approach to legal stakeholders.”

“Commercial/GTN leader with GCP experience managing multi-year, multi-megawatt AI/GPU infrastructure commitments, owning segment P&L and governance for take-or-pay/reserved capacity. Drove a major client partnership scaling ARR from $50M to $100M in 18 months by aligning Product/Engineering, GTM, and infra teams and building flexible, margin-protective commercial structures. Known for speeding hyperscaler procurement/security reviews (FedRAMP/SOC2, IAM, data residency) and operationalizing multi-region delivery with landing zones and IaC.”

“Meta engineer who improved a critical revenue estimation dataset pipeline that was arriving ~6 days late—diagnosed via raw logs/lineage, redesigned legacy scans to only process the needed window, and shipped validation plus freshness/lag dashboards. Delivered ~50% latency reduction (to ~3 days) and regained adoption by running old/new pipelines in parallel with gated cutover and evidence-based customer communication. Applies incident-response rigor to real-time LLM/agentic workflow debugging and regularly runs developer demos/workshops.”

“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).”

Ravikanth Kasamsetty

Screened

Executive AI/ML Engineering Leader specializing in cloud-native SaaS and GenAI platforms

23y exp

“Engineering leader who modernized and unified a fragmented product suite at Milestone via a multi-year cloud-native roadmap, delivering an MVP in three quarters and boosting team velocity by 40% through cross-functional squads. At Prometheum, led a trust-building hybrid architecture (AWS control plane + customer-hosted data plane) using Kubernetes to ensure sensitive enterprise data never left customer networks while remaining cloud-agnostic across providers.”

Suparna Roy

Screened

Executive Cloud Infrastructure & SRE Leader specializing in AI-driven reliability and security

Austin, TX14y exp

“Engineering/technology leader with IBM Cloud experience leading large-scale infrastructure modernization from classic architecture to a standardized VPC/next-generation DC platform. Reports major outcomes including cutting region launch time from ~18 months to ~3 months and reducing operating costs by ~80% via automation, modular undercloud services, and platform standardization, while scaling a globally distributed org with clear service ownership and accountability.”

Sara Rubacha

Screened

Engineering Manager specializing in databases and distributed systems

Weston, FL21y exp

“Aspiring founder exploring an AI automation startup focused on automating processes involved in building companies. Not yet developed specific use cases or raised capital, but describes a clear plan to validate ideas through use-case research, building a pilot, and testing with early customers; not familiar with the VC/accelerator landscape yet.”

“Fitbit engineer who has taken multiple projects from concept to release, including architecting a new warranty-evaluation system that achieved 100% accuracy and saved the company $6M. Interested in exploring startup ideas and emphasizes mission alignment and building strong cross-functional teams.”

“DevOps/SRE focused on cloud-based distributed systems, with strong hands-on Kubernetes production experience (microservices deployments, Helm, probes, resource tuning, CI/CD and Docker build standardization). Demonstrated end-to-end troubleshooting across application, infrastructure, and networking layers—e.g., isolating degraded storage via node disk I/O metrics and restoring performance by draining the node and replacing the volume. Builds Python automation for operational reliability, including scheduled Kubernetes secrets rotation integrated with an external secret manager.”

Sergey Pustovit

Screened

Director-level Data Platform & Analytics Engineering Leader specializing in distributed systems

Irvine, CA31y exp

“Entrepreneurially minded builder focused on proving architecture concepts via minimal demo prototypes for marketing. Has hands-on experience improving an A/B experimentation framework by interviewing stakeholders, identifying system limits and bottlenecks, and defining success criteria to scale experimentation and speed up analysis.”

“Frontend-leaning full-stack engineer who built an internal real-time operations dashboard from 0→1 using React, TypeScript, Redux Toolkit, Material UI, and Node.js integrations. Stands out for hands-on performance tuning at scale—profiling and fixing excessive re-renders, optimizing live-update UIs, and iterating post-launch with caching, pagination, and observability.”

“AWS engineering manager leading delivery for an end-to-end encrypted communications product (calling/messaging/screen sharing), including shipping read receipts with full design/engineering/QA ownership. Demonstrated strong customer-driven problem solving (offline/mission users enrollment via admin one-time codes with account allowlisting) and reliability improvements (data retention bot crash RCA, monitoring/notification, and high-volume test simulation).”

“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.”

Pratham Thukral

Screened

Mid-level Software Engineer specializing in distributed systems on AWS

Seattle, WA3y exp

“Data/infra engineer with AWS DynamoDB experience who has shipped reliability-critical systems (Global Tables replica repair protocol) and customer-facing service rollouts using canary/percentage-based deployments, strong observability, and rollback strategies. Also built end-to-end Airflow pipelines producing weekly automated reports over ~10TB of advertising segment data, with rigorous week-over-week data quality validation.”