Vetted System Design Professionals

Rajesh Sivakumar

Screened

Senior Software Engineering Manager specializing in cloud-native distributed systems (FinTech & Healthcare)

San Francisco, CA26y exp

“Engineering leader/player-coach who has led 40+ developers across multiple teams on large financial services web applications (Wells Fargo) and previously delivered a banking mobile app MVP in 6 months with a junior team by setting patterns and CI/CD foundations. Strong in production reliability practices (Splunk monitoring, feature flags, throttled rollouts) and has driven measurable quality/velocity wins, including a 60% faster E2E test framework and a rapid 2-day hotfix during a React 16→18 migration.”

Erick Folckemer

Screened

Senior Gameplay Systems Programmer specializing in AAA game systems and networking

Raleigh, NC8y exp

“Gameplay engineer with shipped experience (Just Cause 4) and strong systems ownership in C++/Unreal Engine 5, including a loot spawning/loot table pipeline optimized through profiling-driven memory copy elimination and validated via custom simulation tools. Also built a server-authoritative fast travel system in a proprietary engine, handling multi-player/vehicle spawn coordination with client-side collision checks and latency testing across NYC and Stockholm.”

Ganesh Pittala

Screened

Senior Software Engineer specializing in distributed systems and cloud-native platforms

New York, USA5y exp

“Backend-leaning full-stack engineer with experience at Walmart, Qualtrics, and American Express, shipping secure partner-facing API platforms and internal monitoring dashboards. Strong in AWS production operations (ECS/Fargate, RDS/Postgres, CloudWatch) plus rigorous testing/security practices, with measurable delivery and performance improvements (35% faster releases; ~30–40% latency reductions).”

“Unity/C# gameplay engineer with strong multiplayer systems experience, including shipping a DarkRift-based server-authoritative architecture with prediction/reconciliation and measurable gains: frame time improved from ~30ms to 18ms and packet sizes dropped by roughly 40%. Also brings practical thinking around AI-assisted content tooling, using async service layers, JSON pipelines, and validation rules to support designers without disrupting production workflows.”

Will Long

Screened

Principal Gameplay Programmer specializing in game systems and cross-platform architecture

Remote, US16y exp

“Principal-level game engineer with deep Unity/C# systems experience who rebuilt a core procedural reels framework for long-term extensibility and partner-team adoption. Also stands out for early, hands-on AI/LLM gameplay work in a multiplayer text game, including NPC memory/personality systems, custom model deployment, and cost-scaled inference infrastructure, plus shipped VR RTS experience across Quest/Rift-era and mobile VR platforms.”

“Aspiring founder focused broadly on the AI space, with no startup yet and novice familiarity with venture capital and accelerators. They are actively acclimating to the startup ecosystem through hackathons and meetup groups and express a strong all-in commitment to entrepreneurship.”

“Built from scratch a social media analytics MVP featuring an LLM-powered semantic search agent that became a core part of the product experience within a 6-week deadline. Stands out for focusing on production readiness early—retrieval-first design, explicit tool constraints, structured outputs, idempotent services, and practical eval/monitoring loops rather than demo-only AI.”

“Software engineer focused on internal platform and workflow automation, with hands-on experience building a React/TypeScript + .NET/MSSQL application that streamlined laptop provisioning for employees. Also contributed in a very early-stage startup setting by introducing Agile process and helping shape initial architecture, and is now expanding Python/AI skills while looking to deepen Go and Kubernetes expertise.”

Ahmed Khalafalla

Screened

Entry-level Software Engineer specializing in full-stack and backend development

Boston, MA1y exp

“Frontend/full-stack web developer with hands-on experience building browser-based applications including a social-style platform and a banking web app. Stands out for practical performance optimization work—separating frontend/backend architecture, designing APIs, reducing unnecessary rendering, and improving UI clarity through iterative user testing.”

“Full-stack engineer who has owned an operations/reporting dashboard end-to-end, spanning React/TypeScript frontend architecture, ASP.NET Core APIs, and SQL data access. Stands out for combining strong UI performance optimization with pragmatic backend decisions, post-launch monitoring, and 0→1 startup platform building that improved API speed by 35% while supporting 2,000+ transactions per hour.”

“Backend/full-stack engineer who has owned production retail and order/inventory systems end-to-end, using Spring Boot microservices with Kafka event-driven workflows. Strong in production correctness patterns (idempotency, retries/DLQs, schema versioning) plus observability (Prometheus/Grafana) and developer-facing API design (Swagger, OAuth2/JWT, versioning/deprecation). Also built TypeScript/React SPAs and cited ~40% UI performance improvement.”

Muhammad Ali

Screened

Senior Full-Stack Engineer specializing in cloud-native FinTech and AI systems

Virginia, USA9y exp

“DevOps-focused engineer with 8 years of hands-on experience in early-stage startup environments, working on small teams to modernize CI/CD and Kubernetes deployments. They report reducing release times from hours to minutes, improving reliability and production recovery, and building backend APIs and automation for an internal SaaS platform shaped by security, scale, and compliance requirements.”

“Engineering leader focused on developer platforms and identity: led a 5-person team building a multi-tenant IAM framework extending Duende IdentityServer, including governance, API standards, and multi-language SDKs. Drove major API architecture improvements by introducing GraphQL alongside REST, cutting client calls from 4 to 1 and reducing payload size by 60% within 6 months, with strong emphasis on stability (semver, E2E tests, feature flags, blue-green deploys).”

“Veteran implementation consultant with 30+ years of hands-on ERP, functional consulting, and business analysis experience across multiple industries. He has repeatedly owned full lifecycle delivery, including a successful ERP financial and distribution implementation completed in under four months, and later returned to upgrade a long-term electronics client 15 years after the original deployment.”

“Engineering leader who grew from Lead Developer to CTO at Clips4Sale, scaling the org to around 30 people while restructuring engineering around revenue-driving initiatives like search, payments, reliability, and creator tools. Also built AI-powered event discovery and chatbot systems at FOSH using Claude, combining human feedback, prompt evaluation, and product simplification to improve output quality and user experience.”