Vetted Vice President of Engineerings

Christopher McLean

Screened

Executive engineering leader specializing in security, privacy, and high-scale infrastructure

Brookline, MA18y exp

“Veteran operator from top-tier tech companies including PayPal, LinkedIn, Stripe, Facebook, and Merge, now seeking the right startup idea to found. Brings hands-on angel investing experience across 5 startups in the EU and US plus additional exposure through X-Stripe Angels, giving them both operator and investor perspective.”

Jim Woodroffe

Screened

Executive Engineering Leader (CTO/VP) specializing in scaling platforms, AI, and cloud infrastructure

San Francisco, CA24y exp

“Entrepreneurial operator who previously built an AI context layer for personal communication/relationships and has worked with a New York-based venture group to evaluate early-stage ideas from both technical and business angles. Currently exploring broad startup opportunities and collaborating with 2–3 early-stage companies, with a structured approach to assessing market outcomes, competition, and team fit.”

“Fintech product builder focused on AI-native opportunities; recently helped their company operationalize LLMs in customer service and bank ops by creating systems to continuously improve prompts and evaluations. Also drove growth by identifying hooks in a major American retailer distribution channel and integrating into the retailer’s payment flows to become a key part of the user funnel.”

Arijit Das

Screened

Executive engineering leader specializing in AI, cloud, and FinTech transformation

Dallas, TX20y exp

“Fintech operator at Upstart with hands-on experience in lending underwriting and verification automations, now developing a fully automated HELOC product aimed at reducing funding timelines from 30-45 days to 5 days. Brings strong market conviction in the HELOC space and has already spoken with fintech investors interested in a white-label solution for banks and credit unions.”

“Repeat startup co-founder with multiple successful exits and significant fundraising experience (most recent raise $6M USD; prior raise £10M GBP). Interested in roles bridging investors and startups—performing due diligence and evaluating MVPs/USPs to help firms invest in the right companies and support portfolio growth toward exit.”

David Lapsley

Screened

Executive Engineering Leader specializing in AI infrastructure and cloud platforms

Tampa, FL14y exp

“Founder building Shipkode.ai, an enterprise SaaS product using generative AI to automate the front half of the software development lifecycle—from idea and customer feedback to engineering-ready specifications—with a beta planned for the first week of April. Has spoken with 24+ VCs over two years and mentors cybersecurity startups through the Tampa Bay Wave accelerator, emphasizing rigorous customer discovery to avoid misaligned product development.”

“Engineering leader who built and scaled a distributed team (Serbia + US) to deliver an internal multi-tenant Kubernetes-based PaaS, moving a large org from manual ops-driven deployments to automated CI/CD with >99.97% uptime and 100% service adoption. Known for culture change (blameless post-mortems, clear intake via ticketing) and security-first platform practices (tenant isolation, Falco) supporting SOC2 compliance; also operates at exec level with stakeholder communication and fundraising.”

“Four-time founder with hands-on experience inside angel- and venture-backed executive teams, plus accelerator mentorship experience. Brings a practical, customer-validation-driven approach to company building, with strong insight into early-stage team dynamics and investor ecosystems.”

Ravikanth Kasamsetty

Screened

Executive AI/ML Engineering Leader specializing in cloud-native SaaS and GenAI platforms

23y exp

“Engineering leader who modernized and unified a fragmented product suite at Milestone via a multi-year cloud-native roadmap, delivering an MVP in three quarters and boosting team velocity by 40% through cross-functional squads. At Prometheum, led a trust-building hybrid architecture (AWS control plane + customer-hosted data plane) using Kubernetes to ensure sensitive enterprise data never left customer networks while remaining cloud-agnostic across providers.”

“Engineering leader who built and delivered an IoT smart-spaces platform for the self-storage and smart-living domains, translating customer requirements into architecture, capability maps, and a multi-milestone roadmap. Personally stood up missing AI/ML capabilities (including churn prediction) using Databricks (Delta Lake/MLflow), enabling follow-on features like energy optimization and security/anomaly detection. Scaled an org from 20 to 80+ with disciplined Agile planning (Jira Advanced Roadmaps/Confluence) and strong executive/customer-facing leadership during high-stakes customer commitments.”

“Engineering leader (ActiveCampaign, Yalo) with a track record of scaling both systems and orgs: grew an engineering team from 90+ to 200+ (30+ scrum teams) while re-architecting a marketing automation platform from batch to near real-time. Led major infrastructure shifts (RabbitMQ to Kafka, multi-region redundancy) and reports outcomes including 600%+ throughput gains, 99.99% uptime, and business growth from ~80K to 185K customers with revenue surpassing $200M over ~3 years.”

“Engineering/data platform leader from FLYR (airline ML forecasting and automated pricing) who built scalable ingestion/ETL and a canonical data model to onboard airlines with highly heterogeneous source systems. Created a golden-metrics layer for airline KPIs and implemented monitoring/backfill capabilities, cutting onboarding time by 50%+ while improving SLA performance and controlling cloud/ML training costs through stronger data quality gates.”

“Seasoned business leader with decades of leadership experience (including Fortune 50/500) and prior Silicon Valley startup exposure, now pursuing entrepreneurship. Building “Datascension,” a gamified, story/episode-based career coaching platform that includes hands-on tasks (e.g., SQL queries, Python scripts) plus a participation-based credit/currency system and certification/badging, informed by feedback from recruiters and coaching/recruiting firms.”