Vetted Vice President of Engineerings in California

“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.”

“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.”

“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 leader and hands-on architect from Sony Pictures Entertainment who has led large-scale platform modernization, digital supply chain delivery, and multiple GenAI/RAG initiatives in media and rights-management domains. Notable for combining people leadership with deep AWS/LLM architecture work, including a 1M+ record GenAI title search system and AI-driven contract insights that reportedly helped unlock a 20% revenue increase.”

Ravikanth Kasamsetty

Screened

Executive engineering leader specializing in AI, data platforms, and cloud SaaS

California, USA23y exp

“Senior engineering executive with a rare mix of VP-level people leadership and deep hands-on architecture across cloud-native and AI platforms. He led secure hybrid SaaS design at Promethium, built GenAI-powered analytics with LLMs/RAG, and translated customer needs into product wins including the largest deal in company history and a PLG motion that generated 100+ leads.”

“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.”

“Engineering leader and player-coach with a long tenure leading 5 teams/17 engineers, combining organizational leadership with hands-on SQL, architecture, and production incident work. Particularly notable for shipping AI-powered lead engagement systems like an intelligent voice agent, while also driving operational improvements such as release cadence standardization, team restructures, database migrations, and major rules-engine performance gains.”

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).”