Vetted PHP Professionals

Rob Wlaschin

Screened ReferencesStrong rec.

Director-level Engineering Manager specializing in AI platforms, FinTech, and Healthtech

Santa Clara, CA24y exp

“Serial entrepreneur building three distinct products: a context-aware AI chatbot, a connected TV companion-screen platform with an implementation client, and gamerogue.net, a mobile-optimized web-based virtual tabletop marketplace currently seeking funding. Brings hands-on fundraising experience, familiarity with the VC/accelerator ecosystem including YC, and a notably pragmatic approach to validating ideas based on existing market demand rather than speculative adoption.”

Alexander Meyer

Screened ReferencesStrong rec.

Senior/Lead Game Developer specializing in Unity and cross-platform multiplayer games

Paphos, Cyprus28y exp

“Veteran Unity game developer with extensive multiplayer networking experience (Photon PUN2/Quantum/Fusion, Unity Netcode), including work on Payday: Crime War and an in-development arena battler using Invector + PUN2. Also builds cloud backends for Unity titles (Azure/PlayFab/Firebase, SQL, CI/CD) and actively uses multiple AI assistants to speed up architecture and implementation.”

“Frontend engineer at Mailchimp who leads end-to-end React/TypeScript features on the in-app homepage, including onboarding and campaign discovery components. Demonstrated measurable performance impact by cutting homepage LCP by ~2.5s and successfully shipped a major feature on an accelerated deadline using structured QA and staged rollout.”

“Master’s student and Deep Learning teaching assistant who teaches LLM/VLM fine-tuning (including LoRA) and built a Hugging Face LLM fine-tuned for unit conversion, improving reliability by analyzing synthetic data and filling missing number-system conversion examples. Also implemented the Raft consensus protocol using gRPC in a distributed systems course with correctness validated by unit tests.”

“Founder of an LLC operating as a consulting firm providing fractional CTO services to startups, giving them parallel exposure to multiple early-stage companies. Has direct experience with MVP development, building org structures from scratch, and supporting early fundraising, and is exploring a pivot from consulting into a scalable product business while staying engaged with the VC/accelerator ecosystem.”

“Cross-functional product/engineering leader with startup and enterprise experience (Whimstay, Wells Fargo, Leap AI Technologies). Has owned end-to-end delivery including UI and payment architecture—built a multi-customer reservation payment flow using pre-auth plus event/timer-driven reminders and handled tricky edge cases like date changeover. Also introduced lightweight process (Jira, sprints, team/module structuring) to increase delivery speed in an early-stage AI document-matching startup.”

Nikitha Kommidi

Screened

Mid-level AI/ML Engineer specializing in fraud detection, NLP, and MLOps

6y exp

“Built a production real-time fraud detection and customer-support automation platform at Citibank, tackling extreme class imbalance (reported ~1:5000) and strict latency constraints. Combines hands-on MLOps (Airflow, Kubernetes, MLflow; Snowflake/Spark/S3 integrations; CI/CD model promotion) with cross-functional delivery to Risk & Compliance focused on interpretability and reducing false positives.”

Vikram Kini

Screened

Mid-Level Full-Stack Engineer specializing in React, TypeScript, and microservices

3y exp

“Built and productionized an AI agent-based in-app assistant at ISAFE to guide users through document workflows, piloting with a partner school district and then rolling out across districts. Combines hands-on LLM/agent debugging (logs, fallback rates, state/context tracking) with strong technical demos and sales enablement through live workflows and pilot programs (e.g., Osceola School District).”

“Cloud-focused platform/infrastructure engineer centered on AWS and Kubernetes, with hands-on experience building EKS environments via Terraform/Terragrunt, bootstrapping clusters with Cilium and ArgoCD, and integrating persistent storage and backup tooling like EFS/EBS CSI and Velero. While no longer focused on on-prem or hybrid operations, they also bring prior VMware/Hyper-V and migration-to-AWS experience, making them strongest in modern cloud platform engineering roles.”

shivapriya pillalamarri

Screened

Mid-level AI/ML Engineer specializing in financial analytics and production ML systems

Boston, MA4y exp

“Analytics candidate with experience in financial transaction and fraud detection projects, combining SQL data preparation, Python-based automation, and dashboarding. They have owned projects from stakeholder alignment and metric definition through rollout, with emphasis on reducing false positives, improving operational efficiency, and making analytics outputs easy for business teams to adopt.”

Sai Harshith Tanguturi

Screened

Mid-Level Software Engineer specializing in Java microservices and AWS cloud-native systems

Grapevine, TX3y exp

“Full-stack engineer who has owned customer-critical analytics and course intelligence platforms end-to-end (React/TypeScript + Node/Express + SQL), including an internal self-serve Reporting & Analytics Center adopted by 1,000+ users. Demonstrates strong systems thinking across performance (2× faster heavy reports), reliability (feature flags, testing), and distributed architecture (RabbitMQ microservices with idempotency, DLQs, and correlation-ID observability).”

Prachika Agarwal

Screened

Senior Solutions Architect and Data Analyst specializing in cloud data platforms and experimentation

New York, NY4y exp

“Software engineer who built and scaled an internal automation/auditing tool for analyzing Google and Adobe tagging containers, adopted by 13 internal clients and saving ~15 hours per audit. Has experience shipping containerized, Kubernetes-orchestrated systems and integrating OpenAI APIs into an agentic chatbot feature (plus prior NLP chatbot work during a Cyber Peace Foundation internship).”

“Backend engineer with TaskRabbit experience building and operating payment/booking services in Python/Django on AWS (ECS + Lambda) with Kafka/SQS eventing. Demonstrates strong production reliability and incident ownership in high-stakes payment flows (idempotency, strict timeouts, retries, monitoring/alerting) plus data/ETL work in AWS Glue and measurable SQL performance wins.”

Dendy Saputro

Screened

Junior Software Quality Engineer specializing in test automation and mobile app testing

Jakarta, Indonesia1y exp

“QA tester with Android native app experience spanning manual, automation, functional, and performance testing, including maintaining Python-based automation scripts across frequent software and device updates. Interested in pivoting into console game testing and has baseline familiarity with platform certification concepts (Sony TRC/Microsoft XR/Nintendo LOT), plus uses AI tools to help analyze large volumes of issues and reduce missed defects.”

Joshua Hewitt

Screened

Senior Software Engineer specializing in Generative AI product development

San Francisco, USA9y exp

“AI product builder at Padlet who shipped multiple production LLM features for education workflows, including an AI document generator (AI Recipes) and a RAG-enabled in-product chat assistant. Built an AI microservice layer (LangChain) to swap model providers easily and created automated + human-in-the-loop evaluation systems (including ~100-test runs) to iterate on prompts and quality.”

“Senior engineering executive with 8+ years leading large-scale SaaS modernization across AI, compliance, ecommerce, streaming, IoT, and travel. Has led a 150+ global engineering org, modernized seven cloud-native platforms for a $400M business, and consolidated travel systems processing $1B+ annually while staying hands-on in architecture, incident response, and AI integration.”

“Frontend-leaning full-stack engineer with strong ownership in network observability and analytics products, including BT Group's SMARTS platform and SSpain.ai at Texas A&M. Stands out for building data-dense, near-real-time dashboards and shaping products end-to-end across React/Angular frontends, FastAPI backends, PostgreSQL, AWS, and even React Native mobile surfaces.”

Namrata Shivshankar patil

Screened

Mid-level Backend/Full-Stack Engineer specializing in cloud, AI, and distributed systems

Arlington, TX6y exp

“Built and shipped internal AI support systems spanning Angular/TypeScript frontends, Java/Spring/AWS backends, and Claude-powered troubleshooting workflows. Stands out for combining full-stack product delivery with practical LLM engineering, including RAG, structured outputs, production evals, and careful human-in-the-loop safety decisions. Has shipped systems serving 150-800 daily sessions at 99.5% availability while reducing repetitive support burden.”

“Frontend engineer focused on marketing and analytics products, including a real-time multi-touch attribution dashboard. Uses Next.js (SSR/ISR) with React/TypeScript and Tailwind, and emphasizes quality at scale via automated testing, CI/CD (GitHub Actions), feature-flagged staged rollouts, and Mixpanel-driven iteration. Experienced modern state management patterns (React Query + Zustand) and performance tuning (code-splitting, dynamic imports, lazy loading).”

“Developer with experience across Drupal and Java/Spring Boot applications using React/jQuery for UI and API-driven features. Has handled production issues by tuning reverse proxy timeouts for login problems and troubleshooting data pipeline inaccuracies by fixing database queries, with a focus on performance and careful verification before changes.”

Harini Vinu

Screened

Intern Software Engineer specializing in cloud, big data, and test automation

New York, United States1y exp

“Internship experience at Qualitest building and deploying an LLM-powered test automation system that reduced manual test creation and improved efficiency (~40%). Demonstrates strong production engineering for LLM systems (timeouts/retries/monitoring/caching, prompt optimization, batching) and has scaled workflows to 100+ concurrent jobs; also has orchestration experience with AWS Step Functions and Kubernetes.”

“Full-stack developer who uses AI thoughtfully as a productivity multiplier rather than a substitute for engineering judgment. Built a stock search platform with React, Node.js, and MongoDB, and has experimented with multi-agent workflows across frontend, backend, debugging, and documentation while keeping rigorous human review over logic, testing, and maintainability.”

“Backend/AI engineer who has owned production agentic systems end-to-end, including a CRM-integrated multi-agent financial workflow at Wow Payments that cut latency by 83% and achieved 98% uptime. Also built an AI real estate product ('Site IQ') by turning vague stakeholder goals into a geospatial autonomous agent using RAG, rapid prototyping, and tight validation layers around GPT-4 outputs.”