Vetted Performance Optimization Professionals

MichaelJose Oakes

Screened ReferencesStrong rec.

Senior Unity/XR Engineering Manager specializing in real-time interactive and multiplayer experiences

9y exp

“Unity Technologies engineer with direct Meta subcontract experience shipping Quest titles (Horizon Worlds projects like Super Rumble) and supporting third-party studios. Strong in VR performance optimization and modernization work—porting legacy OVR/older-Unity projects to OpenXR, URP, and hand-tracking inputs. Built a master’s dissertation cross-platform multiplayer FPS spanning Quest VR, PC, and mobile AR using Photon.”

“Engineering Manager/Tech Lead on Grindr’s monetization team who helped ship an AI-powered conversation summary feature (A-list), contributing across Android freemium implementation and backend LLM workflow service architecture/reviews. Demonstrated strong operational ownership by leading a Boost production incident from detection through rollback and prevention, and improved team throughput by introducing a lightweight end-to-end delivery process in a high-growth environment.”

RajaSekhar Divakaruni

Screened

Director-level Engineering Leader specializing in Payments and Financial Services

Edison, New Jersey21y exp

“Senior Director-level engineering leader from Zelle who built a multi-year cloud and use-case expansion roadmap (e.g., SMB and brokerage funding) aligned to an aggressive growth target (from $1.2T to $5T in 5 years). Experienced scaling an engineering org from ~25–30 people into domain-driven pods and leading audit/compliance remediation (OCC, SOC 2, PCI) through security and infrastructure reengineering, including multi-region/multi-zone architecture.”

“Frontend tech lead at HubSpot who shipped an LLM-powered insights dashboard that analyzed complex customer interaction histories and surfaced sentiment, challenges, and next-best actions for sales users. Stands out for having taken an AI feature beyond prototype into beta and full production, with strong emphasis on testing, maintainability, and practical production tradeoffs.”

“Backend/data engineering candidate with Netflix experience designing and migrating analytics platforms from batch to real-time streaming (Kafka/Flink) across AWS and GCP. Delivered measurable improvements (40% lower data delay, 99.9% accuracy) using phased rollouts, automated data validation (Great Expectations), and strong observability (Prometheus/Grafana), and proactively hardened pipelines with idempotency to prevent duplicate Kafka processing.”

“ML/AI engineer with experience at Uber and Scale AI, focused on customer service automation across both classical NLP and generative AI systems. Has owned systems from experimentation through production on AWS, including LLM fine-tuning, RAG optimization, safety evaluation, and internal Python platform tooling that improved consistency and engineering velocity.”

“International development program manager with experience across major institutions (World Bank, McKinsey, Deloitte) and multi-country complex programs, including multi-million-dollar US government finance projects. Known for driving executive alignment and accountability through data-driven messaging, disciplined follow-up cadences, and productivity tooling/process improvements (e.g., Asana).”

Jehanzeb Khan

Screened

Director-level Engineering Manager specializing in large-scale data and compute platforms

Sunnyvale, CA20y exp

“Platform and distributed-systems leader (player-coach) who owned architecture and reliability for an Amazon analytics/data platform serving ~100K internal users at exabyte scale. Built an ML-driven “Lakeflow” optimization layer that cut pipeline completion times ~20–25% and reduced compute waste >15%, and led major incident response/redesign efforts (e.g., deletion storm) with strong rollout/observability/rollback practices.”

Adam Wermus

Screened

Senior Data Engineer & Render Tools Developer specializing in VFX and render farm pipelines

Santa Monica, CA7y exp

“Real-time simulation/physics engineer who optimized character effects and cloth for the "Infinity" game by implementing and profiling multiple ODE integrators, including pioneering the largely undocumented Parker-Sochacki method (optimized 5/7 sims; >30% speedup on a particle system). Also built SPH fluid solvers in Unity (C#) and created Grafana/Python Dash dashboards to analyze latency/throughput, with strong interest in applying math/physics and tooling to soccer/football gameplay.”

KARTHIKBABU VADLOORI

Screened

Mid-level Full-Stack Developer specializing in Spring Boot, React, and cloud microservices

San Francisco, CA5y exp

“Backend engineer with experience at Meta and Accenture building regulated-data systems (healthcare/financial) using Python/Flask and Postgres. Has scaled high-throughput services to millions of daily requests, delivering measurable latency wins (~40% API latency reduction; ~35% faster DB-backed endpoints), and has productionized ML inference services using Docker/Kubernetes and AWS (ECS/SageMaker).”

“Unity/C# gameplay engineer from Roku who led and shipped a cross-platform real-time multiplayer system spanning Meta Quest VR and iOS/Android, including AI/LLM-driven NPC behavior. Reported strong post-launch outcomes (+40% VR retention, +25% engagement) with stable networking (server-authoritative, delta compression/prediction) and robust debugging/observability via logging and replay tools.”

“Spatial computing software engineer focused on making Apple Vision Pro/visionOS accessible, including building VoiceOver and Live Captions features. Debugged a complex Live Captions issue involving dual audio inputs during FaceTime screen sharing by leveraging iOS implementation docs and creating concurrent audio sources; also has safety-critical testing experience from train control systems and is interested in pivoting into robotics.”

“Internship experience deploying cloud-based services into production, including navigating security/resource provisioning and coordinating approvals across impacted teams. Built a Python backend for a local Ollama-based app using open-source models, and has hands-on distributed systems experience implementing and debugging Paxos with extensive logging/state tracing.”