Joe Costello

“Engineering manager/player-coach in the Alexa media ecosystem who led delivery of a Tier-1 gateway service enabling third-party providers (e.g., Spotify/Pandora) to control playback across users’ Echo devices, driving 10–15% lifts in engagement metrics. Deep in API design, AWS infrastructure choices (EC2 vs Fargate), OAuth/LWA auth flows, and production rigor (security reviews, load testing, feature-gated dial-ups), with demonstrated incident ownership and operational automation wins.”

“Platform/backend engineer focused on Kubernetes at scale: built a Java control-plane service for multi-region cluster provisioning/monitoring/upgrades using Kafka-driven async workers, and solved peak-load provisioning failures by eliminating blocking I/O and dynamically scaling consumers. Also shipped an LLM-assisted Kubernetes troubleshooting/remediation feature that pulls Prometheus logs/metrics into prompts and uses guardrails (confidence thresholds + human-in-the-loop) to prevent risky actions.”

Thazim Banu Shaffee

Screened ReferencesStrong rec.

Engineering Manager specializing in payments, risk, and high-scale distributed systems

San Jose, CA14y exp

“Engineering leader/player-coach on a risk core transaction platform (payments/branded checkout) who led major migrations from a monolithic stack to microservices, including API contract redesign and performance improvements (reported ~500ms latency reduction). Experienced running high-stakes production incidents (upgrade-related outage/degradation) end-to-end with RCA and rollout-process changes, and has accelerated delivery via documentation/tooling (audit sign-off cycle reduced from ~3 sprints to ~1).”