Vetted Prototyping Professionals

Neel Sen

Screened ReferencesStrong rec.

Executive product leader specializing in AI, platforms, and growth

Florham Park, NJ13y exp

“Innovation leader with 8 years managing Verizon's innovation arm, working closely with venture teams, innovation studios, and early-stage startups across multiple markets. Currently building a homeowner-focused AI startup with a working backend prototype using LLM and multimodal AI, combining enterprise product lifecycle experience from Cisco with 0-to-1 venture building.”

hemant jha

Screened

Executive Design & Innovation Leader specializing in product, strategy, and sustainable systems

Chicago, Illinois25y exp

“Product/system designer focused on ultra-clean, modular, customizable work/organization environments (e.g., making stations for studios and fabrication spaces). Emphasizes rules-based interaction models, restrained structural visual language, and hands-on field research/prototyping to embed industrial constraints (tolerances, load paths, safety) into intuitive, training-free user experiences.”

“Engineering/product leader with repeated experience defining roadmaps and delivering platform migrations across SaaS and enterprise contexts. Scaled an education system from two districts to 2M+ students statewide, and led an Elasticsearch-based architecture for an internal Disney product serving ~100K employees. Known for rigorous execution (RAID/OKRs/sprints), strong stakeholder communication (weekly AI summaries), and empowering teams via end-to-end ownership and customer-connected development.”

“AWS-focused software engineer who built a self-serve ETL pipeline scheduling service for non-engineers, including automated CloudFormation-based onboarding that cut setup time from 2–3 weeks to ~5 minutes. Strong in production reliability and customer-facing data platforms (EMR/DynamoDB/Lambda), with examples spanning pagination at scale, cross-table consistency, and phased rollouts to improve Parquet log SLAs.”

“Player-coach engineer/lead on a high-scale research integrity platform ("Lighthouse") that flags fraud/manipulation signals across ~3M academic manuscripts per year. Owns architecture decisions (ADRs), implements across Go/Java/React services, and introduced NLP (SciBERT embeddings + human-in-the-loop) to assess out-of-context citations while also handling production incidents with a data-consistency-first approach.”

Rom Manzano

Screened

Executive technical founder and full-stack engineer specializing in AI, SaaS, and FinTech

New York, NY15y exp

“Engineer coming out of a venture studio as it winds down, now seeking another zero-to-one environment with strong studio support and go-to-market playbooks. They show a thoughtful founder mindset centered on rapid shipping, design-partner validation, lean execution, and testing whether users will actually pay for a workflow-specific solution.”

Christian Alcala

Screened

Mid-level Software Engineer specializing in LLM-powered analytics

Redwood Shores, CA4y exp

“Engineer with a pragmatic, production-focused approach to AI development, emphasizing verification, observability, and system design over hype. Built LLM-driven features and automated regression/validation pipelines, including quality measurement work at Oracle, and uses hands-on projects to test how AI fits into real business workflows.”

“Built and deployed a production RAG-based semantic search and summarization system for large legal/technical document sets, owning the full backend (embeddings, vector store, chunking, prompting) and driving a reported 40–60% reduction in manual review time. Experienced with LangChain/LlamaIndex plus Airflow/Temporal-style orchestration, and applies rigorous evaluation/monitoring (A/B tests, drift detection, staged rollouts) to keep agentic systems reliable. Also partnered with a supply-chain manager at TE Connectivity to deliver an AI inventory recommendation tool projected to drive millions in value.”

“Co-founded academic-index (10,000+ users) and built a full-stack Next.js 14 document upload + client-side OCR + Gemini-powered analysis pipeline with strong production reliability (custom monitoring, retries, quality gates) and measurable gains (accuracy ~94%→98.5%, failures down ~60%). Also owns end-to-end biometric data visualization and a data-driven brand/UX overhaul at pre-seed health/performance startup Absolute Rest, with a background running a multi-client dev studio (Zen Digital).”

“Robotics software engineer with Stanford coursework and Georgia Tech research experience, focused on end-to-end autonomy for mobile manipulation and real-time planning under uncertainty. Built a ROS 2 LoCoBot system combining Gemini speech-to-text, YOLO-based RGB-D perception, navigation, and grasping with robust synchronization/TF fixes, and developed an information-theoretic UGV planner for radiological source localization validated via Monte Carlo simulation.”

Varna Sharma

Screened

Senior Product Marketing Manager specializing in sustainable materials and data center cooling

Midland, MI9y exp

“Global marketer currently at Dow owning end-to-end strategy across go-to-market, channel, customer engagement, promotion, and innovation, with heavy cross-regional executive alignment. Previously at Modern Meadow, made data-driven product strategy calls (e.g., resisting a high-profile Wimbledon footwear request to stay on a higher-margin handbag launch path) and is adept at streamlining stakeholder communication using targeted meetings and async documentation.”