Vetted Web Developers in the Bay Area

Mike Henniger

Screened ReferencesStrong rec.

Staff Software Engineer specializing in scalable backend and full-stack web systems

Burlingame, CA32y exp

“Frontend-leaning full-stack product engineer with IMVU experience who designed both user-facing flows and the production telemetry behind them. Most notably, they built a JavaScript crash detection system using signature-based aggregation and Redis that helped reduce crash volume from millions per day to tens of thousands, and they pair that reliability mindset with reusable UI architecture and onboarding design for consumer social products.”

Sanjay Santhanam

Screened

Mid-level AI Software Engineer specializing in LLMs and FinTech data systems

San Jose, CA4y exp

“Backend/AI systems engineer focused on productionizing agentic document-processing workflows for large financial PDFs. They describe owning deployments end-to-end, combining Python, Redis, LLM function calling, RAG/ReAct-style orchestration, and strong reliability practices to deliver 80% faster processing, reduce parsing errors from 12% to ~1%, and sustain 99.9% uptime in high-concurrency environments.”

“Full-stack engineer with experience shipping production features in both networking (Cisco: ACL object groups, 3G/4G) and fintech/online banking (PLAID, Auto Pay, OLB, membership qualification). Works primarily with React/Java/Hibernate and REST/JSON, emphasizing caching/memoization for UI performance and strong testing/XP practices to maintain quality under faster release cycles.”

“Backend engineer with experience at Roche and Jarsy focused on API and data-layer performance. Re-architected slow generalized endpoints into more efficient APIs (30% faster lookups) and led a schema refactor/migration with feature-flag rollout, dual writes, rollback scripts, and automated integrity checks; also addressed pipeline duplicate-entry issues via deduplication.”

“Backend engineer with TaskRabbit experience building and operating payment/booking services in Python/Django on AWS (ECS + Lambda) with Kafka/SQS eventing. Demonstrates strong production reliability and incident ownership in high-stakes payment flows (idempotency, strict timeouts, retries, monitoring/alerting) plus data/ETL work in AWS Glue and measurable SQL performance wins.”

“Frontend engineer with strong ownership in regulated healthcare/patient-facing products, including redesigning legal/privacy document workflows so non-engineering teams could safely publish updates without release cycles. Has also built frontend architecture from scratch, optimized large internal data-grid experiences, and recently worked in a forward deploy role directly with clients to shape product solutions.”

Kris Wen

Screened ReferencesModerate rec.

Mid-level Software Engineer specializing in AdTech and AI-enabled web engineering

San Francisco Bay Area, CA4y exp

“Software engineer at American Express who built a zero-to-one first-party cookie tracking architecture as the industry moved away from third-party cookies, combining frontend, backend, CI/CD, and AI-assisted QA automation. Particularly strong in developer tooling and workflow automation, with measurable impact including 70% less manual QA, 8+ critical errors caught pre-production, and PR cycles reduced from 48 hours to under 8.”