Vetted Director of Engineerings

“Engineering leader who drove Lightroom Mobile’s roadmap at Adobe by enforcing reuse of Photoshop imaging tech to deliver RAW, non-destructive mobile editing with full Creative Cloud compatibility. In startup environments, has repeatedly scaled and professionalized engineering orgs (career ladders, evaluation systems, delivery process) and led high-stakes cloud/platform transformations—migrating off Heroku and consolidating fragmented AWS/GCP usage into a single GCP platform—improving reliability, deploy speed, and cutting cloud costs by 20%+.”

“Senior Microsoft engineering leader who has led globally distributed orgs of up to 250 engineers while staying deeply technical in large-scale platform architecture, reliability, and AI systems. Notable work includes modernizing Teams infrastructure serving massive global scale and incubating an internal AI pair-programmer/knowledge-graph platform over 650M lines of code, plus helping launch foundational Copilot search and retrieval APIs.”

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.”

“Serial entrepreneur with multiple startups and demonstrated VC fundraising experience, including raising $125K for a current business plan and building investor relationships across several VC firms. Driven by tackling difficult problems and assessing opportunities through a lens of solution creativity and team execution, while prioritizing sustainable quality of life.”

Marc Urbaitel

Screened

Director-level engineering leader specializing in cloud infrastructure and compliance systems

Portland, OR24y exp

“Experienced software builder and former founder who ran his own startup for 15 years in the late 1990s, focused on bleeding-edge online ticketing technology. Brings a mix of hands-on software delivery, team building, and startup leadership, though he is currently seeking a well-backed opportunity with strong cash compensation rather than entrepreneurship at all costs.”

RAMAKRISHNA JULURI

Screened

Executive Technology Leader (SVP/VP/CTO) specializing in cloud-native platforms and AI modernization

Seattle, WA28y exp

“Engineering leader with experience across MSCI (Index business), Microsoft Teams (callings/meetings), and MSN Weather. Has led business-aligned roadmaps, scaled orgs (including an ~80-person Teams org during COVID demand surge), and delivered Azure-based, multi-region architectures achieving ~2000 RPS and 99.9% availability with improved RTO/RPO.”

David Lapsley

Screened

Executive Engineering Leader specializing in AI infrastructure and cloud platforms

Tampa, FL14y exp

“Founder building Shipkode.ai, an enterprise SaaS product using generative AI to automate the front half of the software development lifecycle—from idea and customer feedback to engineering-ready specifications—with a beta planned for the first week of April. Has spoken with 24+ VCs over two years and mentors cybersecurity startups through the Tampa Bay Wave accelerator, emphasizing rigorous customer discovery to avoid misaligned product development.”

Sergey Pustovit

Screened

Director-level Data Platform & Analytics Engineering Leader specializing in distributed systems

Irvine, CA31y exp

“Entrepreneurially minded builder focused on proving architecture concepts via minimal demo prototypes for marketing. Has hands-on experience improving an A/B experimentation framework by interviewing stakeholders, identifying system limits and bottlenecks, and defining success criteria to scale experimentation and speed up analysis.”

“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.”

Joshua Seiden

Screened ReferencesStrong rec.

Executive Technology & Product Leader specializing in emerging tech commercialization

Centennial, Colorado33y exp

“Startup operations/product advisor and long-time accelerator mentor who has helped multiple early-stage companies become enterprise-ready—shifting teams to customer-driven roadmaps and implementing CI/Agile delivery processes. Notably supported an Israeli company in landing a Fortune 30 customer before it later IPO’d on NASDAQ, and helped an Australian startup operationalize delivery to secure deployment with a major telecom and sports league.”