Vetted System Design Professionals

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).”

Jared Alessandroni

Screened ReferencesStrong rec.

Executive CTO specializing in AI, cloud platforms, and scaling SaaS products

21y exp

“NYC-based startup founder/CTO who sold products to Omnicom and Sprinklr, then built an AI-powered cultural insights engine inside Omnicom using AWS Lambda + ML to process ~1M items/day and reached ~$1MM ARR in year one. Former senior leader at Sprinklr managing 200+ people globally, delivering enterprise martech solutions with SLAs and high-reliability social data pipelines (Twitter firehose).”

“Product Manager at Amazon focused on recruiting technology and AI/ML, owning ATS experiences at massive scale across 24M annual applications. Stands out for driving a vision to turn Amazon's ATS into an AI-native platform, with measurable business impact including $10M+ in savings, major recruiter efficiency gains, and strong experimentation-driven product decisions.”

“Project lead who partners with PM and customers to gather requirements, adjust project plans, and deliver new functionality that drives customer satisfaction and revenue. Has experience building features end-to-end and presenting successful technical demos to engineering and management audiences; no stated experience with LLM/agentic systems.”

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.”

Scott Hwang

Screened

Senior Game Designer specializing in multiplayer systems and live service experiences

Irvine, California18y exp

“Gameplay systems designer with shipped AAA experience on Overwatch, including end-to-end ownership of player progression and major systems like matchmaking (role delta system cutting uncertainty/volatility by 50%) and Stadium mode round/shop + MMR/balancing systems (second-highest engaging mode). Strong in KPI/retention-driven design, player research, and telemetry-based balancing, with a UE5 Blueprint prototyping workflow built for modularity, data-driven tuning, and handoff to engineering.”

“Engineer with startup experience spanning fintech and B2B SaaS, from Playd during rapid growth to Clarity’s AI-powered contract review platform. Particularly strong in React/TypeScript product development for complex, data-heavy workflows used by accountants and finance teams, with supporting experience in Node, Postgres, AWS, and production database design.”

Sara Rubacha

Screened

Engineering Manager specializing in databases and distributed systems

Weston, FL21y exp

“Aspiring founder exploring an AI automation startup focused on automating processes involved in building companies. Not yet developed specific use cases or raised capital, but describes a clear plan to validate ideas through use-case research, building a pilot, and testing with early customers; not familiar with the VC/accelerator landscape yet.”

George Liu

Screened

Intern Software Engineer specializing in full-stack, backend, and AI agent systems

Fremont, CA1y exp

“Backend engineer with Tesla experience who redesigned vehicle registration into a step-based, region-configured workflow across 4–5 microservices, enabling partial saves and reducing customer drop-off. Has hands-on experience scaling and securing Python/FastAPI APIs (OAuth2/JWT, CORS), migrating cold data from MySQL to MongoDB via Kubernetes CronJobs, and implementing RBAC/RLS with Supabase + Postgres.”

“Fitbit engineer who has taken multiple projects from concept to release, including architecting a new warranty-evaluation system that achieved 100% accuracy and saved the company $6M. Interested in exploring startup ideas and emphasizes mission alignment and building strong cross-functional teams.”

“Backend/data engineer with Amazon supply-chain experience building production serverless Python services and ETL pipelines on AWS (Lambda, API Gateway, S3, RDS, Glue). Has modernized legacy SAS jobs into Python with rigorous parity testing and phased migrations, and has delivered major SQL performance gains (minutes down to seconds) through indexing and partitioning.”

“Robotics software candidate with hands-on experience building controllers for an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle, including dual-PID control in Python with state-space modeling and a planned path to LQR. Developed ROS nodes for odometry-based localization, waypoint planning, and control command publishing, validated through a custom Gazebo/ROS simulation workflow with control-metric-driven testing. Also worked on F1Tenth simulation and scan-matching localization (PL-ICP), with additional cloud deployment experience using Docker/Kubernetes and CI/CD.”

“Technologist drawn to venture studio/zero-to-one environments, motivated by owning technical architecture and building scalable systems from day one. Interested in rapidly shipping MVPs, iterating toward product-market fit, and validating ideas through real user feedback rather than pursuing entrepreneurship for its own sake.”