Vetted Ruby Professionals

“Backend-leaning full-stack engineer who has built AI-powered analytics products from 0→1, including a predictive analytics dashboard and an AI orchestrator for natural-language-to-database querying. Particularly strong in making LLM systems production-safe through schema validation, self-healing retries, monitoring, and retrieval optimization, with quantified impact on cost, latency, and quality.”

“Software engineer with hands-on experience shipping production AI agents and end-to-end ecommerce workflows. They built a customer support automation agent with strong guardrails and evaluation practices, then improved it post-launch using real user data to cut latency ~30% and token cost ~25%. Also drove a zero-to-one self-serve order modification product across React UI, backend services, and cross-functional alignment.”

Jonathan Dearborn

Screened

Senior Gameplay Engineer specializing in VR and cross-platform gameplay systems

14y exp

“Unreal Engine (C++/Blueprint) gameplay systems engineer who shipped major VR social-sports features in Orion Drift, including a wieldable items system that became the game’s primary IAP revenue driver and supported 75-player lobbies via careful replication/performance tradeoffs. Also built the station/server browsing system to steer players into lively lobbies and implemented backend-to-frontend tech tree infrastructure using Unreal DataTables, plus tuned standout mechanics like rideable rockets and Driftball projectile/ball behavior through frequent playtests.”

“GCP-focused database/infrastructure engineer with hands-on production support for Cloud SQL and Firestore, spanning provisioning, IAM, scaling, backups, and performance tuning. They also described supporting a hybrid GCP architecture for a monolithic on-prem PostgreSQL workload and resolving a major latency incident by tracing cascading failures and fixing indexing issues.”

Scott Knight

Screened

Director-level software engineering leader specializing in SaaS and Healthcare IT

Portland, OR23y exp

“Candidate is exploring startup ideas focused on SaaS tools for small and medium-sized businesses, especially IT and HR automation. They have prior experience in VC-backed companies and with accelerators, and stand out for emphasizing real customer feedback and prototyping over echo-chamber startup advice.”

Shady Alzayat

Screened

Executive engineering leader and full-stack builder specializing in platforms, payments, and healthcare

San Francisco, CA20y exp

“Serial entrepreneur building appetier.com, an agentic restaurant marketing and ecommerce automation platform for restaurants. Previously raised for Atlas Mental Health and brings thoughtful fundraising perspective centered on investor alignment, GTM partnership, and vertical SaaS/SMB infrastructure expertise.”

“Robotics/embedded candidate who built an IoT smart shoe for visually impaired users, implementing real-time obstacle detection with ultrasonic sensors and haptic feedback on Arduino. Has practical ROS experience (RViz/Gazebo) and improved reliability in distributed systems by hardening an Arduino-to-ROS serial protocol with framing, strict parsing, and sensor-noise filtering; also containerized ROS environments with Docker for reproducible simulation and onboarding.”

Kirill Aristarkhov

Screened

Junior Software Engineer specializing in full-stack, AI/ML systems, and game development

Santa Barbara, CA3y exp

“Full-stack engineer (React/TypeScript + Bun/Node-like backend) who recently rebuilt a terminal-based chat UI, implementing custom Markdown lex/parse/render and a typewriter-style streaming renderer while optimizing React DOM growth for ~50% faster performance. Has startup experience making high-ownership decisions under ambiguity and rapidly integrating multiple external AI/tooling services (5–6 in a week) with fallback strategies for flaky dependencies.”

EMMANUEL ETIENNE

Screened

Engineering Manager specializing in FinTech money movement and AI-driven infrastructure

Brooklyn, NY12y exp

“Player-coach fintech engineer/engineering lead who built a deterministic payer-ID wire reconciliation system with Citi, including idempotent ingestion and webhook processing across Ruby and Go, materially reducing accounting manual work. Experienced in incident response (Plaid-related customer-impacting issue), stakeholder-driven MVP scoping for ACH status visibility, and delivery acceleration via infrastructure templating (EC2) and standardized Magento project setups.”

Uday Dorawala

Screened

Director-level Engineering Leader specializing in SaaS platforms, data, and cloud modernization

Raleigh, NC25y exp

“Former founder with an acquired venture who later led R&D at McClatchy and joined multiple startups. Identified a major client need and built a mobile app platform using ML and AR for home builders, driving adoption by dozens of customers and $1M+ ARR. Strong hands-on builder who can architect MVPs, iterate quickly with A/B testing and user feedback, and scale early engineering teams and culture.”

“Commercially minded candidate with exposure to private equity firms as sales targets and experience building partnerships around venture-backed company ecosystems. They appear more inclined to join an existing company than found one, bringing a metrics-driven, process-oriented approach and creative execution style with a strong focus on clear growth paths and capital stability.”

“Full-stack engineer with ~20 years of experience (including 5–6 years in consultancy) who has shipped and operated production systems across a wide range of stacks. Recently owned an end-to-end receipts feature integrating Stripe, generating PDFs, and sending HTML emails, deployed via GitHub Flow to AWS ECS; handled real-world performance issues (oversized merchant images) with compression and server tuning.”

“Backend engineer with cloud-native Python/Flask experience building high-throughput financial platforms (loan origination intelligent document processing and real-time fraud detection). Has scaled microservices on AKS with event-driven Azure messaging, delivered measurable performance gains (e.g., 700ms→180ms query latency; ~40% API improvements), and implemented strong security controls (OAuth2/JWT, Azure AD RBAC, audit logging, AES-256/TLS) for sensitive regulated data.”

Tyler Stroud

Screened

Executive Engineering Leader specializing in AdTech and scalable cloud platforms

Miami, FL15y exp

“Engineering leader with experience in small, bootstrapped startups and exposure to VC environments, currently pursuing CTO-level opportunities. Thrives in fast-iterating, high-uncertainty settings and emphasizes data-driven clarity plus strong problem/market validation when evaluating new ventures.”

Serge Ahranovich

Screened

Executive CTO / Platform Architect specializing in IoT, telematics, and EV charging infrastructure

Los Angeles, CA20y exp

“Founder of TimeTick (timetick.io), an AI-powered diagnostics platform for IoT combining device simulation, automated testing, and real-time monitoring—initially focused on EV charger diagnostics. Former VP of Engineering with a track record of building IoT systems from scratch and applying AI to detect protocol-failure patterns that drive downtime; currently supporting existing customers and converting pilots (with leads like Siemens and ABB) into paid subscriptions.”

“AAA sports game QA tester who supported full development through launch and live updates, owning gameplay stability/regression risk. Experienced in triage-driven prioritization and in diagnosing complex crash issues (including thread synchronization) using evidence-backed Jira reports, then hardening coverage with stress/concurrency/soak and CI-integrated regression suites.”

Rupini Polavarapu

Screened

Senior DevOps Engineer specializing in AWS cloud infrastructure and CI/CD automation

Atlanta, GA10y exp

“AWS platform/infra engineer with hands-on ownership of EKS cluster lifecycle (upgrades, node scaling, networking/ingress, and EBS-backed stateful storage) and reliability validation using Datadog plus CI/CD smoke tests. Also supported on-prem VMware environments and operated a hybrid on-prem-to-AWS setup over site-to-site VPN, including incident response and implementing change-controlled firewall processes and proactive connectivity health checks.”

Luke Evers

Screened

Director-level engineering leader specializing in full-stack product and e-commerce systems

Remote12y exp

“Candidate is an aspiring founder currently exploring startup ideas and potential collaborators, with firsthand experience as an early employee at VC-backed companies, including joining a current company shortly after seed funding. They have not raised capital themselves but bring early-stage operating exposure and a strong desire to build something they own with a high-trust team.”