Vetted Software Engineers in the Chicago Metro

Brian Sanders

Screened

Senior Backend Engineer specializing in GenAI, LLMs, and scalable data pipelines

Chicago, IL12y exp

“Backend/ML platform engineer from Snapsheet who owned production Python services and data pipelines for insurance claims, including an AI document classification/summarization FastAPI service on ECS/Fargate processing 1M+ documents/year. Strong in AWS infrastructure (Terraform, CI/CD, secrets/IAM, autoscaling), Glue/PySpark ETL with schema evolution controls, and legacy SAS-to-microservices modernization with safe, feature-flagged rollouts and measurable performance wins.”

“Data engineer with experience at Bloomberg, UBS, and Bank of America building high-volume financial data platforms and services. Owned an end-to-end pipeline processing ~150–200M records/day (Kafka/Cassandra/S3 → Spark/PySpark → Snowflake) with strong data quality controls and Airflow reliability practices, reporting ~99% reliability and major performance gains. Also built large-scale external API ingestion with compliance-minded rate limiting, schema versioning, and quarantine/validation layers.”

“Researcher from the University of South Dakota who built a production medical RAG system to help interpret model predictions by retrieving relevant clinical notes and medical literature, overcoming retrieval accuracy and imaging-dataset challenges through semantic chunking and metadata-driven indexing. Also has hands-on orchestration experience with Airflow and Azure Data Factory, plus a pragmatic approach to LLM evaluation and stakeholder-driven iteration.”

Yun-Ting Chiou

Screened

Junior Full-Stack Software Engineer specializing in TypeScript, React, and Java microservices

Chicago, IL2y exp

“Software engineer with finance-domain experience who built an internal transaction management system end-to-end at Prospect Equities (TypeScript/React Native + Java Spring Boot microservices on AWS), delivering 40% lower query latency and 73% operational efficiency gains. Has also designed Terraform-provisioned, SQS-based distributed systems and scaled workloads to 10,000+ concurrent users, including monolith-to-SOA modernization that cut internal review time by 47%.”

“Built and owned Alight's AI-powered Search Summary feature end-to-end, using a RAG pipeline with OpenSearch and Bedrock, and drove a 20% increase in user feedback scores. Stands out for bringing rigorous production evaluation to LLM systems via live LLM-as-a-judge monitoring, and for experience with advanced agentic architectures, hybrid search, and reranking at scale.”

“Founding Principal Engineer/Head of Engineering at Amberflo (Seed $5M Homebrew; Series A Norwest) who built and shipped an AI Gateway + real-time LLM cost metering/pricing MVP end-to-end (control plane/data plane, AWS infra, CI/CD). Known for extremely fast MVP cycles (often 1–2 weeks), scaling teams (50–60 hires), and driving major pivots (usage-based billing to FinOps) by repurposing an existing metering/pricing platform; based in Chicago and has led a Silicon Valley startup remotely with frequent Bay Area travel.”