Vetted Testing Professionals

Kaustubh Rai

Screened ReferencesStrong rec.

Mid-level Software Engineer specializing in distributed systems and cloud-native microservices

PA, USA2y exp

“Software engineer with ~2 years at UnitedHealth Group plus CMU coursework/TA experience, spanning backend modernization and cloud-native operations. Worked on migrating a customized open-source EDI system from Python 2 to Python 3 while improving SQLite database traceability via JSON exports, and has hands-on Kubernetes microservices deployment on Azure using Helm, HPA, and Jenkins-based Git-triggered CI/CD. Also built a large-scale real-time ride-hailing simulation using Kafka + Samza with explicit fault-tolerance strategies.”

“Director of Engineering at Proofpoint for 8 years, leading architecture and integration of Java microservices within a detection platform. Demonstrates pragmatic delivery leadership—incurring short-term cost to meet launch deadlines, then systematically paying down technical debt and optimizing AWS spend—plus a disciplined, long-horizon approach to backward-compatible API/schema evolution across many dependent services.”

“Engineering leader (Sr Director/VP) with healthcare marketplace and e-commerce/art marketplace experience who has shipped AI-driven pricing, scaled engineering teams rapidly, and navigated messy legacy integrations. Currently doing fractional tech advisory, leading a migration from self-hosted infrastructure to Google Cloud using IaC while mentoring a junior developer and modernizing security/patching posture.”

Osvaldo Calles

Screened

Senior Software Engineer specializing in developer tools, cloud automation, and generative AI

Redmond, WA13y exp

“Built and deployed a production chatbot on osvaldocalles.com and iterated through real-world LLM engineering issues: model quota/cost tradeoffs (migrating to Nova Pro), RAG accuracy via semantic chunking, AWS IAM/guardrail/security pitfalls, and Lambda/API Gateway streaming constraints (prefers JS for streaming layer). Experienced with agent orchestration using Strands SDK (AWS-focused) and LangGraph (Vercel/container deployments), plus evaluation pipelines using LLM-as-evaluator, dashboards, and staged model rollouts.”

Kaushik Sriram

Screened

Mid-level Software Engineer specializing in event-driven FinTech backend systems

San Francisco, CA5y exp

“Senior/Staff-level backend/platform engineer who owned Stripe’s global payout settlement system end-to-end, building an event-driven Python/Kafka platform processing millions of events daily across 30+ countries. Deep experience operating high-reliability distributed systems in production (incidents, replays/backfills, schema evolution, observability) and scaling on AWS/EKS with strong testing and deployment practices.”

Patrick Jose

Screened

Senior AI Engineer specializing in LLM applications and full-stack systems

San Francisco, CA8y exp

“Built and owned a production LLM/RAG customer support assistant end-to-end, from prototype through deployment, monitoring, and iteration. Their work automated roughly 40% of common support queries and cut response times by about 30%, while also creating reusable Python inference services that improved consistency and team velocity.”