Vetted Performance Optimization Professionals

Luka Baljak

Screened ReferencesStrong rec.

Senior Software Engineer specializing in full-stack web and AI-powered SaaS

Baljak Luka, Serbia7y exp

“Frontend-leaning product engineer who took broad ownership of a recently launched AI-powered customer support chat designed to deflect support tickets. They designed the overall system, built the full frontend, contributed to backend work, and served as a key source of product and technical continuity for a globally distributed team.”

“Candidate brings an operator-to-founder profile with leadership experience in IT and Business Systems and a strong grasp of how ideas become venture-backable products. They speak fluently about startup evaluation criteria such as TAM, technical defensibility, speed to scale, and AI differentiation, and appear especially motivated by building solutions end-to-end in startup or venture studio environments.”

Dhananjay Sharma

Screened ReferencesModerate rec.

Mid-level Full-Stack Engineer specializing in AI and FinTech platforms

Stony Brook, NY6y exp

“Full-stack engineer who built RegArt’s product from 0→1 for enterprise compliance users at clients like HSBC and EY, including the production React frontend, backend APIs, and an LLM-powered search experience. Particularly compelling for startups needing someone who can move across UI, API, and data layers, make pragmatic architecture tradeoffs, and ship fast without over-engineering.”

“Backend-focused engineer with deep Java/Spring expertise in fintech and SaaS integrations, including high-scale financial data pipelines and partner-facing APIs. Most notably re-platformed a 100M+ record ETL system to a custom concurrent Spring Batch architecture that cut failures dramatically and reduced infrastructure costs by over 90%, while also leading enterprise-grade event-driven integrations for customers like Bosch and Amazon.”

“Hands-on production engineer with deep Oracle tuning and observability-driven troubleshooting experience in a 24x7 healthcare system used by pharmacists across the U.S. While not yet hands-on with GCP databases, they bring strong transferable cloud and platform experience from AWS/Azure, including migration work, memory leak remediation, HA/DR operations, and end-to-end performance debugging across DB, JVM, and network layers.”

“Software engineering candidate who built a compiler-like Python tool to translate between Python code and UML-style diagrams (and back). Also has hands-on AWS experience building a distributed pub/sub system using services like Lambda, API Gateway, ELB, WAF, VPC, and DynamoDB, plus ML projects using Kaggle datasets (e.g., diabetes risk analysis).”

“Full-stack engineer with end-to-end ownership across React/TypeScript frontends, Spring Boot/Node microservices, and production ops on Docker/Kubernetes and AWS (ECS/CloudWatch). Built real-time healthcare eligibility and analytics systems at Cigna and an early-stage seller onboarding platform at Flipkart, driving measurable performance gains (35–40% latency/throughput improvements) through event-driven Kafka pipelines, Redis caching, and strong reliability/observability practices.”

“Built and deployed a production credit card fraud detection platform that scores transactions in real time using TensorFlow/scikit-learn models exposed via a Spring Boot REST API, with strict SLAs, fallback to legacy rules, and Splunk-based monitoring/drift tracking. Also has enterprise orchestration experience with TIBCO BusinessWorks (BW 6.6/BWCE), coordinating REST/SOAP services and JMS messaging (TIBCO EMS) with robust error handling and compensation logic.”

“Paid media specialist with hands-on ownership of high-spend digital audio, including a $75K/month Progressive campaign run in Spotify (trafficked via Megaphone and Google Ad Manager). Demonstrates a structured full-funnel approach across Meta/TikTok/Google and a rigorous testing and incrementality mindset (marginal CPA/ROAS, saturation signals, new-user contribution, branded search lift) to guide optimization and scaling.”

“Robotics software intern who worked on a customized ROS1-based middleware, building ROS node orchestration and a ROS topic monitoring system. Improved intra-machine ROS topic performance by using shared memory and circular buffers instead of socket-based IPC, and integrated nightly Jenkins CI with Groovy/Python to run tests and produce code coverage reports.”

“ML/NLP engineer currently working in NYC on a system that connects complex unstructured data sources to deliver personalized insights, using embeddings + vector DB retrieval and a RAG architecture (LangChain, Pinecone/OpenSearch). Strong focus on production constraints—especially low-latency retrieval—using FAISS/ANN, PCA, index partitioning, and Redis caching, plus PEFT fine-tuning (LoRA/QLoRA) and KPI/SLA-driven promotion to production.”

“Engineering lead/player-coach working on project management software, owning a high-impact scheduling algorithm rewrite focused on performance, maintainability, and documentation after prior team turnover caused regressions. Previously at EOX Vantage, helped an insurance client modernize monolithic workflows by scoping ambiguous requirements into a roadmap and shipping a day-one MVP before iterating with value-add features.”

“Infrastructure/Unix engineer with production PowerHA/HACMP operations experience (resource groups, service IPs, shared storage) who has executed planned failovers and recovered a real outage involving a SAN driver crash and manual Oracle recovery (restored service in ~15 minutes with zero data loss). Also supports cloud DevOps practices including CI/CD security scanning (SonarQube, Snyk), container registry/versioning, and Terraform Cloud-based IaC across AWS and GCP with PR/Jenkins-driven plan-and-apply workflows.”

“Former PwC Director with hands-on early-stage venture experience (e.g., BridgeLights, a big-data analytics concept for early fintech) spanning concept creation, platform architecture, and go-to-market experimentation. Strong focus on building scalable, modular data platforms with rigorous governance/compliance (data lineage, quality controls) and supporting technical diligence in investor-aligned environments.”

“Frontend-leaning full-stack engineer who shipped a civic-tech Next.js/TypeScript app (Boston Police Index) with SSR, dynamic routing, and server-side data fetching, then iterated post-launch with UX and performance improvements. At Walmart (Seller Center micro-frontends), drove large-scale React/TypeScript refactors—standardizing state management, improving hook usage, and cutting type errors ~50%—and earned trust to serve as a code reviewer enforcing quality standards.”

“Full-stack engineer with production experience building and owning high-traffic e-commerce checkout flows in Next.js (App Router) + TypeScript across microservices (REST/GraphQL). Demonstrated measurable performance wins (30% checkout improvement; 85% initial load reduction at 20th Century FOX) and strong production rigor (APM/logs, CloudWatch, Postgres indexing + EXPLAIN ANALYZE), including offloading PDF generation to AWS Lambda.”

“Founding engineer at a civic-tech startup (Barrow) who built and operated a Next.js/TypeScript product with map-based public reporting, including clustering and dynamic geospatial loading to improve UX and performance. Also implemented a location-aware RAG chatbot using Pinecone, web scraping/transcription, caching, and fallback web search, and owned post-launch observability plus scaling decisions (load balancing/horizontal scaling) based on API usage patterns.”