Vetted Observability Professionals

Bill Cheng

Screened ReferencesStrong rec.

Director-level Engineering Leader specializing in SaaS platforms and AI systems

Remote, USA26y exp

“Entrepreneurial candidate building an LLC focused on applying AI to improve call center customer service, with an early go-to-market focus on local government call centers. They are already in discussions with a government prospect and have a clear thesis around solving high turnover and low knowledge retention through AI-assisted training and support systems.”

Vincent Fearing

Screened ReferencesModerate rec.

Junior Full-Stack Engineer specializing in FinTech systems

Austin, TX1y exp

“Full-stack engineer with deep experience in high-stakes integrations: owned end-to-end fintech payment notification/installment tracking at an early-stage startup (FastAPI/React/AWS), including multi-environment routing for live banking partners and reliability patterns like idempotency and retries. Also built a Coachella partner ticketing platform (React/TS/Node/Postgres) with strong concurrency controls and zero-downtime migrations, and previously delivered media-asset ETL/file-sharing automation at Sony Pictures using Frame.io with checksum-verified transfers.”

“Research-focused software engineer who builds performance-critical Python/C++ systems emphasizing correctness, state-transition precision, and distributed coordination. Created an automated simulation-based testing/validation framework for quantum programs that caught subtle logic/type errors early, reduced debugging time, and improved developer confidence through strong observability and scalable test generation.”

“Built and shipped a production LLM-powered grading platform that automates rubric-aligned scoring and feedback, with strong guardrails (RAG grounding, structured JSON, validation/retries) and operational rigor (metrics, drift monitoring). Experienced using CrewAI to orchestrate multi-agent workflows end-to-end and validating quality via gold-set benchmarking against human graders with regression testing on every prompt/model change.”

“Built and shipped production RAG/agentic systems in high-stakes domains (biomedical and legal), including an enterprise biomedical document retrieval platform over ~10k scientific docs and a multilingual African-law assistant at the World Bank. Deep hands-on experience with LangChain/LangGraph/LlamaIndex and evaluation tooling (LLM-as-a-judge, safety/hallucination detection), with measurable gains in retrieval quality and hallucination reduction.”

“Built and deployed a production LLM-based RAG agent platform adopted by multiple business teams (Marketing, GTM, Recruiting, Customer Support) to automate knowledge search, Q&A, and content generation. Emphasizes production-grade reliability (grounding/validation/guardrails), rigorous evaluation/monitoring, and cost-aware scaling via model tiering, prompt/retrieval optimization, and caching using LangChain/LangGraph orchestration.”

“Open-source JavaScript library contributor/maintainer focused on performance and usability—uses profiling and user feedback to optimize large-dataset processing and modernize abstractions. Refactored a nested-callback event handling system into an observer-pattern dispatcher with batched event queues, reducing CPU usage and improving maintainability; also handles community-reported crashes by reproducing issues, fixing memory leaks, and updating docs.”

“Built an LLM-powered academic research assistant for a professor (LangChain + OpenAI + arXiv) focused on synthesizing papers quickly, with emphasis on reliability (ReAct prompting, citation verification) and cost control (caching). Has production MLOps/orchestration experience at Cisco and HCL Tech using Kubernetes, plus MLflow and GitHub Actions for lifecycle management and CI/CD.”

“ML/NLP practitioner who built a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system for large financial and operational document sets using Sentence-Transformers (all-mpnet-base-v2) and a vector DB (e.g., Pinecone), with a strong focus on retrieval evaluation and chunking strategy optimization. Experienced in entity resolution (rules + embedding similarity with type-specific thresholds) and in productionizing scalable Python data workflows using Airflow/Dagster and Spark.”

“AI/ML engineer who has deployed transformer-based NLP systems to production via Python REST APIs and Kubernetes on AWS/Azure, with a strong focus on latency optimization (p95), reliability, and scalable orchestration. Demonstrates pragmatic model tradeoff decision-making and strong stakeholder collaboration—improving adoption by making outputs more actionable with summaries, extracted fields, and confidence indicators.”

“Full-stack engineer who shipped a production "Financial Insight" assistant dashboard in Next.js App Router/TypeScript, integrating a RAG pipeline (embeddings + ChromaDB + LLM) via route handlers and owning post-launch performance (latency, token cost, retrieval relevance). Also built/optimized Postgres-backed workflows for an outbound dialer and callback routing engine handling ~10,000 daily contacts, validating query performance with EXPLAIN (ANALYZE, BUFFERS).”

“Backend engineer with American Express experience maintaining an internal Python/Flask rewards simulation microservice used by product analysts and QA. Demonstrated strong performance and scalability work: moved batch simulations to Celery, added Redis caching to cut DynamoDB latency, and tuned Postgres/SQLAlchemy queries with EXPLAIN ANALYZE and composite indexes (bringing API responses under ~200ms by queueing jobs). Also has experience integrating ML via Flask-based model-serving APIs (scikit-learn/LightGBM packaged with joblib) and designing multi-tenant data isolation and tenant-specific configuration systems.”

“Backend engineer working on high-volume insurance claims intake systems who shipped a production GenAI document-classification capability in Spring Boot microservices. Emphasizes reliability in LLM systems (strict schemas, confidence thresholds, monitoring, and manual-review fallbacks) and runs evaluation loops with labeled historical documents to drive prompt/validation improvements and reduce manual review.”

“Cloud/DevOps engineer (6+ years) with healthcare domain experience who has owned production AWS systems end-to-end—building real-time data pipelines and an admission forecasting ML service delivered via API and Tableau. Led EMR modernization from on-prem/VMs to containerized AWS using phased migration and blue-green deployments, achieving ~99.5% uptime while cutting on-prem footprint ~30% and driving major automation gains (up to ~90% manual work reduction).”

“Full-stack engineer who built a cloud storage app feature (file upload/management) with Next.js App Router + TypeScript and owned post-launch improvements. Also has internship experience building a geospatial AI chatbot: designed Postgres/PostGIS data models and optimized spatial queries, and implemented an LLM workflow orchestrated with LangChain/LangGraph plus a RAG pipeline grounded in OpenStreetMap data to reduce hallucinations.”

“Data engineer focused on AWS-based enterprise data platforms, owning end-to-end pipelines from multi-source batch/stream ingestion (Glue/Kinesis/StreamSets/Airflow) through PySpark transformations into curated datasets for Redshift/Snowflake. Emphasizes production reliability with strong monitoring/observability and data quality gates, and reports ~30% performance improvement plus improved SLAs and latency after optimization.”

“Backend engineer (Marsh McLennan) who evolved a high-volume claims automation pipeline in Python, emphasizing thin APIs with background job processing, strong validation/retries, and production-grade observability. Experienced in secure FastAPI API design (centralized JWT/RBAC), multi-tenant Postgres/Supabase-style row-level security, and low-risk refactors using parallel runs and feature flags; targeting founding-engineer scope roles.”

“Data/analytics engineer who owned Angi’s service-request funnel event pipeline end-to-end, routing events server-side to bypass ad blockers and recovering ~15% lost tracking at millions of events/day. Built Snowflake/dbt reporting tables powering Looker dashboards, with strong emphasis on validation, monitoring/alerting, and safe schema evolution. Also shipped a reusable flow state management backend service with TTL storage, CI/CD, and developer-friendly APIs.”

“Data engineer focused on reliable, production-grade pipelines and data services: has owned end-to-end ingestion-to-serving workflows processing millions of records/day, using Airflow, Python/SQL, and PySpark. Demonstrates strong operational rigor (monitoring, retries, idempotency, backfills) and measurable outcomes (98% stability, ~30% faster processing), plus experience exposing curated warehouse data via versioned REST APIs.”

Andre Kuznetcov

Screened

Staff Front-End Engineer specializing in high-performance web apps and AI products

Remote, US4y exp

“Frontend engineer who built uichallenges.design end-to-end in Next.js, delivering hourly AI-generated challenges across timezones and a CDN-backed gallery of 1k+ items while staying fast for 100s of weekly active users. Also led a full replacement of Zenhub’s kanban board, forking DnD tooling and adding custom virtualization + Redux to support thousands of items with real-time socket updates, shipped safely via gradual rollout with Sentry/Mixpanel and A/B testing.”

Mike Gardiner

Screened

Technology Executive / Engineering Director specializing in AI-driven platform transformation

Lehi, UT12y exp

“Built a 0-to-1 iOS mobile gardening application that helps users plan, track, and harvest crops with pest control guidance, weather, and climate-zone-based planting date recommendations. Demonstrated strong customer discovery and MVP-first product execution, including a major data challenge: compiling US climate zone data for every ZIP code from widely dispersed public sources into an app-ready database.”

Madhu Sriram Sengottu Velan

Screened

Entry-Level Software Engineer specializing in backend systems and distributed services

Chennai, IN2y exp

“Backend/AI engineer from an early-stage Japan-based startup (WorkAI) who built a multi-tenant RAG system integrating Notion/Slack/Google Drive with Pinecone and OpenAI, including a chatbot retrieval workflow. Experienced in production reliability (rate limits, retries, verification layers), strong Python/FastAPI engineering practices, and PostgreSQL performance optimization; currently based in India and needs sponsorship.”