Vetted Retrieval-Augmented Generation Professionals

“AI Software Engineer (student employee) at University of Washington IT who helped deploy "Purple," a governed, explainable LLM platform on Azure used by 100,000+ students/faculty/staff. Independently led scalable reliability efforts by building automated agent quality/load/red-team testing and CI/CD health validation (Playwright/Node.js, Azure DevOps), and previously built an explainable AI scheduling assistant for clinical operations at Proliance Surgeons.”

“Built and shipped a production RAG system (“TROJAN KNOWLEDGE”) for answering questions over technical PDFs, using a 3-stage retrieval stack (BM25 + FAISS + cross-encoder) to lift F1 from 71% to 84%. Drove major performance gains with a 3-level cache (memory/Redis/disk) cutting latency from ~200ms to ~10ms, and added Prometheus/Grafana monitoring plus LangChain-based fallback logic to handle OpenAI rate limits under load.”

Sudheer koki

Screened ReferencesStrong rec.

Mid-level AI/ML Engineer specializing in predictive modeling, data pipelines, and RAG systems

Florida, USA5y exp

“Built and productionized an LLM-powered internal knowledge search system in a regulated environment, using embeddings/vector DB retrieval with strict grounding and confidence gating to reduce hallucinations. Reported ~45% accuracy improvement over keyword search and implemented end-to-end orchestration, monitoring, CI/CD, and incremental re-indexing to manage latency and data freshness while driving adoption with business stakeholders.”

“Software engineer with JPMorgan Chase experience building a real-time operations console backend on Spring Boot/Kafka/Kubernetes and resolving peak-load latency through profiling, indexing, caching, and async processing. Also built and owned an AI-driven digital-archives metadata pipeline during a master’s at UNT using OCR + LLaMA-based prompting with validation, near-human accuracy, and human-in-the-loop guardrails.”

Rathi Anand

Screened ReferencesStrong rec.

Senior Full-Stack Software Engineer specializing in Insurance, FinTech, and AI/ML applications

Dublin, CA17y exp

“AI/backend engineer who fine-tuned and deployed a production LLM chatbot using a LangChain + FAISS RAG pipeline, improving latency with PEFT/LoRA and driving strong business impact (40% customer adoption; 92% satisfaction). Also served as technical lead on a data aggregation system for underwriting/quoting, introducing GraphQL for more efficient, maintainable querying and applying CDC to keep cached ranking data fresh at scale.”

Laxminarayana Yaga

Screened

Mid-level AI/ML Engineer specializing in Generative AI, RAG, and MLOps

Missouri, USA4y exp

“Built and deployed a production RAG pipeline at PNC Financial Services to let risk/compliance analysts query millions of internal financial documents in natural language, reducing manual search and speeding regulatory validation. Demonstrates deep practical experience with large-scale document ingestion/OCR cleanup, retrieval performance tuning (hierarchical indexing, caching), and LLM reliability controls (grounding, citations, abstention), plus cloud orchestration on Azure and AWS.”

Sandeep Gandhi

Screened

Executive technology leader specializing in FinTech, identity, and AI-native platforms

San Ramon, CA26y exp

“Current CTO of Idmission leading a 150+ person engineering organization, with deep experience scaling delivery, CI/CD, and architecture modernization. Combines executive leadership with hands-on technical depth across microservices, Kubernetes, and AI systems, including a RAG support platform that reduced resolution time by 50% and passive liveness technology that improved client acquisition by 20%.”

“AI/LLM engineer with healthcare domain experience who built a production clinical support “chart bot” for Molina, including PHI-safe ingestion of 200k+ PDF policies, vector retrieval, and a fine-tuned LLaMA served via vLLM on ECS Fargate. Demonstrated measurable performance wins (HNSW + namespace partitioning; 30% inference latency reduction) and a rigorous evaluation/monitoring approach, while partnering closely with nurses and operations teams to shape workflows and guardrails.”

“LLM/agent production specialist with strong customer-facing and pre-sales chops: turns demo-grade prototypes into reliable, compliant deployments using RAG tuning, guardrails, evals in CI, and observability with staged rollouts/rollback. Known for engineering-first workshops (including live break-and-fix on retrieval misses, tool timeouts, and prompt injection) that win over skeptical senior developers and drive adoption.”

Siva Pothuru

Screened

Mid-level AI/ML Engineer specializing in LLMs, MLOps, and cloud-native ML

San Antonio, TX5y exp

“LLM/agent engineer at USAA who built a production GPT-4o RAG conversational assistant for financial analysts, focused on regulatory interpretation and internal documentation search. Emphasizes compliance-grade reliability with strict grounding, safe fallbacks, and full auditability via MLflow/DVC plus human-in-the-loop review; reports ~45% reduction in ticket resolution time.”

“Backend engineer with insurance/claims domain experience who modernized legacy claims processing systems to support AI-assisted claim review. Emphasizes production-ready API design in Python/FastAPI (schemas, async, caching, graceful degradation), strong observability with Prometheus, and layered security including JWT auth plus database row-level security (Supabase/Postgres).”

“Built and owned an enterprise AI document-processing deployment at an automotive tech startup, taking it from discovery to stabilization. Strong in production LLM/RAG systems and backend reliability, with measurable impact including 8,000+ documents processed monthly and turnaround time reduced from nearly 24 hours to about 3 hours.”

“Backend-focused Python engineer who has owned production FastAPI services deployed on Kubernetes, including CI/CD (GitLab CI to ECR) and GitOps delivery via ArgoCD/Helm. Has hands-on experience with complex reliability and infrastructure work—solving data inconsistency with validation/partial-data paths, fixing K8s liveness issues via lazy loading, and supporting a phased cloud-to-on-prem migration with dual-writes and monitoring. Also built Kafka-based real-time ingestion consumers handling bursty, high-throughput traffic with async processing and topic/retention tuning.”

“Built a production AI-powered customer support Q&A system using an internal knowledge base to reduce repetitive ticket work and improve customer satisfaction, with an emphasis on source-backed answers and expert oversight. Also has experience defining deployment services in a microservices architecture and integrating large-scale APIs (including work connected to US HHS/COVID-19).”

“Built and deployed an LLM-powered mental health therapy assistant at AppHealth that segments users by stress level and delivers personalized, non-medical guidance. Implemented healthcare-focused safety guardrails (secondary LLM output filtering) and a multi-agent router workflow validated via statistical tests and therapist review, then scaled training/inference on AWS (EC2/Lambda/DynamoDB) with Kubernetes.”