Vetted Software Engineers

Michael Forster

Screened ReferencesStrong rec.

Senior Data Engineer specializing in ETL/ELT pipelines and data integration platforms

New York, NY15y exp

“Data engineer/software engineer who led an end-to-end ETL/ELT pipeline at Pearson processing millions of rows of student data nightly, including client-side data prep/validation, SFTP/API ingestion, staging-based SQL validation/transforms, and production loading. Built reliability features like configurable per-client validation thresholds, detailed reporting, concurrency throttling via a custom queue, and multi-source merge/backfill logic to keep nightly loads running even when sources fail.”

Nicholas Pinero

Screened ReferencesStrong rec.

Mid-level Software Engineer specializing in Unity XR/VR training simulations

Remote, USA8y exp

“Unity/C# VR developer who owned a next-gen replay/review system end-to-end, improving determinism so recorded actions (e.g., shots) replayed consistently. Also built a Jenkins-triggered GameDriver-based VR QA automation suite that ran nightly builds and cut manual QA effort by ~75%, and contributed to Photon PUN multiuser mode with hands-on network debugging.”

Igor Prizzi

Screened ReferencesStrong rec.

Senior Game Programmer specializing in Unity gameplay systems and animation tech

London, United Kingdom19y exp

“Unity developer with cross-platform shipping experience (console and mobile) who optimized an open-world game to run on Nintendo Switch at 30 FPS by building a dynamic character pooling/occlusion-culling management system that created the illusion of hundreds of NPCs with only ~30 active. Has owned core character systems (player/NPCs, customization, interactions) and also applies AI tools to rapidly iterate on personal projects like a profitable trading bot strategy.”

“AI Software Engineer (student employee) at University of Washington IT who helped deploy "Purple," a governed, explainable LLM platform on Azure used by 100,000+ students/faculty/staff. Independently led scalable reliability efforts by building automated agent quality/load/red-team testing and CI/CD health validation (Playwright/Node.js, Azure DevOps), and previously built an explainable AI scheduling assistant for clinical operations at Proliance Surgeons.”

“Infrastructure/automation engineer with experience bridging post-acquisition environments (Pandora + SiriusXM) by building an API-driven integration to provision Debian workloads on RHV while preserving iPXE-based imaging workflows. Strong in deep debugging across virtualization/network/OS layers (e.g., resolving virtio/vCPU contention causing network/NFS issues) and in extending automation tooling via custom Ansible/Python modules. Also has exposure to biomanufacturing on-prem devices (Hamiltons, shakers) alongside AWS microservices.”

“Software engineer with JPMorgan Chase experience building a real-time operations console backend on Spring Boot/Kafka/Kubernetes and resolving peak-load latency through profiling, indexing, caching, and async processing. Also built and owned an AI-driven digital-archives metadata pipeline during a master’s at UNT using OCR + LLaMA-based prompting with validation, near-human accuracy, and human-in-the-loop guardrails.”

Carlotta Island

Screened ReferencesStrong rec.

Junior Frontend Engineer specializing in React and FinTech web applications

3y exp

“Developer who uses AI as a practical collaborator rather than a crutch, pairing tools like Claude with console logging, testing, and hands-on validation. They emphasize understanding code, data flow, and architecture while staying current by building projects and following AI and engineering communities.”

“Backend-leaning full-stack engineer who has built AI-powered analytics products from 0→1, including a predictive analytics dashboard and an AI orchestrator for natural-language-to-database querying. Particularly strong in making LLM systems production-safe through schema validation, self-healing retries, monitoring, and retrieval optimization, with quantified impact on cost, latency, and quality.”

“Built across cloud infrastructure, AI-powered product workflows, and backend data reliability in environments including Northeastern, Knead, and Grafx. Particularly compelling for roles needing someone who can both ship AWS-based systems end-to-end and debug messy production issues involving caching, APIs, and data pipelines.”

“Frontend engineer/lead who has owned end-to-end architecture for large customer-facing React/Next.js platforms, emphasizing strong API contracts (GraphQL + TypeScript codegen), automated quality guardrails, and performance as a feature. Built complex workflow UIs including a multi-step patient booking flow for New York’s largest healthcare provider and an admin dashboard handling 400,000+ USDA ingredient records, with disciplined state management, staged rollouts, and real-user monitoring.”

Preetham Dandu

Screened ReferencesModerate rec.

Junior Software Engineer specializing in backend, distributed systems, and cloud platforms

Stony Brook, NY1y exp

“MS candidate with strong backend/data engineering focus who builds research and data systems with production-grade rigor (reproducibility, observability, restartability). Has hands-on experience securing and scaling FastAPI-based gateways in front of Java microservices, leading SQL Server→Snowflake migrations with dual-write/feature-flag rollouts, and hardening Kafka-based fleet-tracking systems against out-of-order and duplicate events.”

“Full-stack engineer with strong Next.js App Router/TypeScript experience who built production dataset search/filtering and data-heavy dashboards backed by Postgres. Demonstrates hands-on performance work across the stack (EXPLAIN ANALYZE, composite indexes, caching, React profiling/memoization) and has built durable, Temporal-like orchestrated data-processing workflows with idempotency and retry strategies in an early-stage startup environment (Gaia AI).”

“Software engineer with hands-on experience shipping production AI agents and end-to-end ecommerce workflows. They built a customer support automation agent with strong guardrails and evaluation practices, then improved it post-launch using real user data to cut latency ~30% and token cost ~25%. Also drove a zero-to-one self-serve order modification product across React UI, backend services, and cross-functional alignment.”

“Early-career engineer who built and launched a zero-to-one AI-driven approval workflow at SDSU that is used daily by roughly 2,000 university users. They owned the system end-to-end—from FastAPI/PostgreSQL backend to React UI—and showed strong judgment around LLM reliability, using a two-step pipeline, validation checks, and human-review fallbacks to cut manual processing time by about 80%.”

“Backend/platform engineer who owned an end-to-end financial data ingestion and validation system (Python/Django/FastAPI, Postgres, AWS), including large-file performance tuning, auditability, and CI/CD. Strong Kubernetes/EKS + ArgoCD GitOps practitioner and has delivered both Kafka-based real-time transaction streaming and a legacy on-prem stack migration to AWS (ECS Fargate, RDS, S3, Secrets Manager) with controlled cutovers and data consistency validation.”

“Built a production AI-powered sales automation system that reads inbound product enquiry emails, extracts structured data, and routes decisions via a rules-based workflow integrated with a product database. Leverages Gemini structured outputs/schema plus option-based prompting and validation to keep responses reliable, and optimizes latency by breaking agent reasoning into smaller LLM calls; evaluates workflows with LangSmith and metrics like completion rate and accuracy.”

Tarang Nair

Screened

Mid-Level Full-Stack Software Engineer specializing in cloud-native APIs and AI apps

Oakland, CA5y exp

“Early-stage startup full-stack engineer who built an inventory and billing management product for retail shop owners in India, iterating quickly based on customer feedback. Has hands-on experience designing scalable cloud infrastructure on GCP with Kubernetes and applying clean architecture for testable, modular systems; also built internal monitoring dashboards for error and performance visibility.”

“Backend engineer from insurance/enterprise platforms with a focus on high-performance, real-time, event-driven microservices. Brings strong distributed-systems communication design plus mature testing, Docker containerization, and CI/CD practices; no direct robotics/ROS experience.”

“LLM/agent production specialist with strong customer-facing and pre-sales chops: turns demo-grade prototypes into reliable, compliant deployments using RAG tuning, guardrails, evals in CI, and observability with staged rollouts/rollback. Known for engineering-first workshops (including live break-and-fix on retrieval misses, tool timeouts, and prompt injection) that win over skeptical senior developers and drive adoption.”

shelly tomar

Screened

Mid-level Founding Engineer specializing in agentic AI for healthcare

null4y exp

“Founding engineer at Grosha who built and operated the backend from scratch, helping scale the product to 65+ countries in a fast-moving startup environment. Also brings healthcare AI experience from United Health Group, where they built backend pipelines for ambient AI scribing using transcription APIs and LLM orchestration with custom validation layers for clinical reliability.”