Vetted Vice President of Engineerings in the Bay Area

“Senior engineering leader with deep hands-on architecture experience across fintech and enterprise software. At DriveWealth, he led a major backend replatform for a brokerage platform handling 10M+ trades per day, combining event-driven design, Kinesis/Kafka, and regulatory-grade accuracy; at TIBCO, he built a Kubernetes-based API management product from near scratch into a successful revenue-generating offering.”

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 and AI product engineer who has owned major production rollouts, including Lending Club's banking-arm launch, and has since built LLM-powered decision systems for finance and climate use cases. Particularly strong in combining stakeholder management with pragmatic architecture choices like observability, deterministic pipeline design, RAG, and document-to-structured-data workflows.”

“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.”

Philip Kearney

Screened

Executive engineering leader specializing in embedded systems, IoT, and wireless networking

San Francisco Bay Area, CA34y exp

“Former Apple employee who worked with Steve Jobs in the early 2000s and is now looking to join startups as a CTO partner to non-technical founders. Brings a thoughtful, skeptical lens on VC-backed startup execution, emphasizing technical feasibility, real product-market fit, and mission-driven teams solving meaningful problems.”

“CTO-minded builder seeking to join a startup; previously created an AI-driven platform that abstracted away DevOps and infrastructure for drug discovery researchers. Emphasizes high-leverage, zero-to-one execution with managed cloud/open-source tooling, and a strong reliability/reproducibility mindset validated against existing scientific pipelines.”

“CTO-level leader with deep insurtech and cloud security/SaaS experience who has repeatedly scaled global engineering orgs and delivered high-velocity roadmaps. Most recently led Delos Insurance Solutions to launch new homeowners programs for wildfire-prone regions every 3–4 weeks while meeting DOI/SLA requirements, driving $135M GWP and $250M capacity and reaching cash-flow positive. Also led major scalability re-architecture at CloudPassage (Postgres to Cassandra + Kafka) and built a large Estonia-based engineering hub at Cybercube.”

Frank Goodman

Screened

Executive Engineering & Product Leader specializing in Cloud/SaaS observability and security

San Jose, CA31y exp

“Product/technology leader with deep security and cloud infrastructure expertise who drove a major shift from hardware-based networking/security appliances to cloud-native capabilities, growing cloud revenue from $0 to $400M in 4.5 years. Led an innovative eBPF-based approach (“precryption”) to enable lightweight cloud TLS interception/decryption, and has hands-on coding interest (recent Rust work on a personal cybersecurity identity/trust platform).”

Ashraf Jahangeer

Screened

Executive engineering leader specializing in AI, SaaS, and large-scale platform transformation

Pleasanton, CA19y exp

“Senior engineering executive with 20+ years of experience scaling and restructuring product engineering organizations across startups and larger companies. Over the last 8 years, they grew teams significantly at Stitch Fix and EasyPost, led monolith-to-microservices modernization, and launched products associated with 50M-100M+ ARR. Currently a hands-on VP Engineering at BlueCargo, combining executive leadership with direct technical contribution when customer-critical issues arise.”

Sean Cohen

Screened ReferencesModerate rec.

Executive medical device engineering leader specializing in digital health hardware platforms

Mountain View, CA7y exp

“Engineering and operations leader in connected healthcare/medical devices with senior experience at AliveCor and Sibel Health. He has owned everything from ultra-thin FDA-cleared ECG hardware architecture and firmware-risk decisions to supplier qualification, manufacturing system buildout, and make-vs-buy strategy across a portfolio of clinical sensing products. Strong differentiator: combines deep technical judgment with hands-on manufacturing scale-up, including taking KardiaMobile Card to mass production in under 18 months and driving Sibel to 98%+ yield with controlled production processes.”

“Operations/process-focused leader with hands-on manufacturing and quality mindset: improved product stability by preventing oxidation via inert gas and oxygen monitoring, and implemented sensor-based automation to maintain conditions without manual intervention. Uses time studies and benchmarking to redesign workflows (reported ~60% labor reduction per batch) and trains teams on GMP/regulatory and contamination-control practices using practical demonstrations.”

“Part-time founder building a bootstrapped IT startup in the R&D phase, running multiple product iterations and cost/benefit analyses to validate uniqueness and monetization potential. Has prior experience working for venture capital firms and is familiar with how accelerators operate, with a strong focus on finding investors who can be true thought partners for rapid pivots.”