Ashwin Rachha

“Engineering leader/player-coach who built and validated a preference-based recommendation engine using clustering, including generating test data to evaluate how clusters evolve over time. Has SRE/DevOps experience and has owned production incidents end-to-end (logging-driven RCA and refactoring patterns that failed at large data scale). Emphasizes quality and platform stability via unit, integration, and load testing, and has managed performance via regular 1:1s and PIPs.”

“Co-founded Aethernet Inc., a B2B IoT connectivity platform with a usage-based revenue model and direct sales motion to device manufacturers. Bootstrapped with founder capital and strict cost control, with angel interest pending technical validation; developed the product through multi-year architecture experiments to deliver measurable latency/reliability/scalability/cost advantages versus DevOps-heavy incumbents like AWS IoT Core.”

Sahitya Thota

Screened

Staff/Tech Lead Software Engineer specializing in identity, data platforms, and cloud systems

Fremont, CA20y exp

“Engineering leader/player-coach who built and owned end-to-end sales-facing data products, including a 360° advertiser insights platform and a sales AI agent for natural-language access to insights. Demonstrated strong architecture and reliability chops (event-driven redesign to eliminate Hive-query throttling; batching/caching to reduce fan-out) plus incident ownership around ads attribution consistency. Also has 0→1 experience building graph-based recommendation/matching systems with explainability and tight user feedback loops.”

Pankaj Goyal

Screened

Director-level Engineering Leader specializing in FinTech, IAM, and AI/ML platforms

SF Bay Area, CA22y exp

“Player-coach backend leader at PostLo who led a major backend architecture upgrade to enable AI-driven features by separating transactional systems from AI workloads (vector embeddings/image validation) and adding async processing for heavy jobs. Also owned production reliability improvements (query/index optimization, workload isolation, monitoring and load testing) and translated an ambiguous retention goal into a shipped cashback rewards feature with auditable transactions.”

Sujit Singh

Screened

Engineering Director specializing in backend & data platforms for enterprise SaaS and cybersecurity

San Jose, CA21y exp

“Backend/data engineering player-coach on a UEBA cloud security analytics platform who standardized MLOps and detection development for 180+ detections, cutting ship time from 6–7 weeks to ~3 weeks while reducing false positives. Proven at operating large-scale streaming + Spark systems (200K+ events/sec, 100+ TB/day), driving major reliability/cost improvements, and leading incident response and team execution through GA.”

“Cybersecurity entrepreneur building a solution focused on emerging AI-driven security risks, aimed at helping mid-sized companies defend against advanced threat actors without needing large internal teams. Has a business plan, has raised capital, and is currently entering a seed VC round while doing fractional CTO/interim work to cover advisor and corporate legal costs amid upcoming EU cybersecurity/resilience policy changes.”