Vetted Sprint Planning Professionals

“Software development manager who led development of the open-source AI agents framework Strands (for Amazon Bedrock), which launched mid-year and is used as a primary agent-development framework at Amazon and externally. Owned the Strands SDK end-to-end, drove adoption through stakeholder management and agile execution, and led a JavaScript-to-TypeScript migration to improve type safety and maintainability.”

“Senior engineering/technology leader with experience driving board-backed, multi-year platform transformations in retail commerce (American Eagle) and scaling ML/product delivery platforms at Amazon Alexa. Known for data-driven build-vs-buy decisions, org scaling (6→80), and measurable outcomes including 98.5%→99.9% uptime, 234 experiments generating ~$200M revenue lift, and increasing delivery velocity from 1.5 to 30 features/week while transitioning to DNN/large-model architectures.”

“Hands-on engineering leader with early-stage startup experience who balances coding with executive alignment and delegation. Has delivered offline-capable SaaS mobile demos under tight timelines, built monetization-ready mobile architectures (dynamic cloud assets + in-app purchases), and increased product velocity via component-based game architecture plus stakeholder self-serve tooling.”

“Repeat startup co-founder with multiple successful exits and significant fundraising experience (most recent raise $6M USD; prior raise £10M GBP). Interested in roles bridging investors and startups—performing due diligence and evaluating MVPs/USPs to help firms invest in the right companies and support portfolio growth toward exit.”

Thazim Banu Shaffee

Screened ReferencesStrong rec.

Engineering Manager specializing in payments, risk, and high-scale distributed systems

San Jose, CA14y exp

“Engineering leader/player-coach on a risk core transaction platform (payments/branded checkout) who led major migrations from a monolithic stack to microservices, including API contract redesign and performance improvements (reported ~500ms latency reduction). Experienced running high-stakes production incidents (upgrade-related outage/degradation) end-to-end with RCA and rollout-process changes, and has accelerated delivery via documentation/tooling (audit sign-off cycle reduced from ~3 sprints to ~1).”

“CRO/operator with experience at both AWS and a rapidly scaling Hawaii-based startup (Mana'olana International), focused on building lightweight but scalable operating systems. Known for implementing QBR/OKR rhythms, capacity/territory planning, KPI dashboards, and ROI-tied funding controls, and for mentoring founders through GTM accelerator work (Blue Startups) using a minimum-viable-process approach.”

“Former Special Assistant at the National Security Council with experience supporting senior federal executives and handling national-security-sensitive information. Helped stand up and standardize operations for a large-scale refugee resettlement effort (60,000 people), creating an executive-driven exception/escalation process and partnering with dev and data teams to prioritize agile sprint work and improve reporting accuracy.”

“Platform/backend engineer focused on Kubernetes at scale: built a Java control-plane service for multi-region cluster provisioning/monitoring/upgrades using Kafka-driven async workers, and solved peak-load provisioning failures by eliminating blocking I/O and dynamically scaling consumers. Also shipped an LLM-assisted Kubernetes troubleshooting/remediation feature that pulls Prometheus logs/metrics into prompts and uses guardrails (confidence thresholds + human-in-the-loop) to prevent risky actions.”

Nishant Pathak

Screened

Executive Engineering Leader specializing in cloud-native platforms and security

14y exp

“Former CTO of EzCred, a fintech embedded finance/digital lending infrastructure startup that built an API-first underwriting and servicing platform using alternative data (e.g., GST and bank statements) to cut loan decisions from days to minutes. Helped raise $1M in seed funding, built the engineering org and compliance-ready cloud architecture, and ran partner pilots before the company shut down during COVID-driven lending market contraction.”

“Gameplay engineer/designer with Unity experience spanning a Peloton open-world multiplayer cycling game (progression, difficulty normalization via FTP, replayability through medals/cosmetics) and a mixed reality soccer training game using a motion-tracked ball. Known for pragmatic, metrics-driven tuning (session length/mission duration), rapid playtest-led iteration, and cross-discipline execution including performance tooling (LOD batch editor) and phased multiplayer implementation planning.”

“Backend/data engineer with healthcare/telehealth domain experience, building patient appointment and data-processing systems on AWS. Has delivered production microservices and ETL pipelines (Flask/Celery, Glue/PySpark) with strong reliability/observability practices (JWT, retries/timeouts, Sentry/CloudWatch) and modernization experience migrating SAS workflows to Python services, including a documented 10min→30sec SQL performance win.”