Vetted Performance Management Professionals

“People operations and talent acquisition leader who was handpicked to launch the first Google Operations Center in the U.S., building the entire hiring and people-program infrastructure from the ground up (including selecting/configuring Greenhouse). Experienced scaling in new markets using deep talent intelligence and transferable-skill frameworks, and currently advises founders as a board member for a talent acquisition startup with a data-and-benchmarks-driven operating cadence.”

“Software development manager who led development of the open-source AI agents framework Strands (for Amazon Bedrock), which launched mid-year and is used as a primary agent-development framework at Amazon and externally. Owned the Strands SDK end-to-end, drove adoption through stakeholder management and agile execution, and led a JavaScript-to-TypeScript migration to improve type safety and maintainability.”

“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%+.”

Monica SilvaGutierrez

Screened

Executive Operations & Chief of Staff leader specializing in org change, People Ops, and operational excellence

New York, NY18y exp

“Senior Program Manager and Chief of Staff at Google who led large-scale cross-functional transformation work, including centralizing program management across a 14,000-person global technical org. Known for building rigorous governance, executive communication cadences, and single-source-of-truth dashboards, while also optimizing executive time and managing sensitive, high-stakes information.”

“Operations leader/advisor experienced in bringing structure to early-stage/growing companies by connecting Vision-Mission-Strategy to execution via roadmaps, accountability, and KPI scorecards with defined operating cadences. Demonstrated measurable impact by redesigning sales compensation around margin by product/retailer, improving profitability by 4 points within six months, and has reported directly to founders/CEOs with sales and finance backgrounds.”

“Recruiting leader with experience managing teams from 5 to 55 and staying hands-on in senior/executive searches. Partnered closely with HRBPs and a CFO at PDT, including designing compensation structures for a junior-talent program and helping build out the CFO’s organization over 6 years. Known for implementing a shorter, structured, data-driven interview process that improved hiring speed and enabled teams to become fully staffed and more proactive in hiring.”

“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.”

“Operations/People Ops-focused startup operator who has supported 6 early-stage companies, implementing scalable recruiting and HR infrastructure (Greenhouse/Lever/Ashby, BambooHR) while intentionally avoiding over-engineered systems. Experienced mentoring founders and junior execs on compensation frameworks (pay grades, market benchmarking, equal pay) and improving cross-functional execution by reducing redundancy through transparent project scheduling.”

Martin Bom

Screened

Director-level Engineering Leader specializing in cloud services and large-scale delivery

Amsterdam, Netherlands31y exp

“Engineering leader with a hands-on developer background who has launched and scaled cloud services at AWS (CloudShell) while also leading AWS Cloud9. Built multi-year roadmaps and cross-org stakeholder alignment (product/marketing/mobile), and has a track record of scaling teams (3x growth) by implementing operational excellence, automated quality gates, and security champion programs; advocates serverless architectures to minimize maintenance and accelerate global expansion.”

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).”

Kristen Hoey

Screened ReferencesStrong rec.

Executive HR & Talent Strategy Leader specializing in Capital Markets

25y exp

“Recruiting and talent leader with experience managing recruiter teams at Citi (8) and Point72 (3), now advising recruiting teams and leaders. Partners directly with CEOs and board members on senior talent selection, executive coaching, and succession planning, and has driven process improvements such as implementing scheduling software and automation to shorten interview timelines and improve candidate experience.”

“Senior executive-operations leader who has run CEO-office functions at BNY (Head of the CEO Office) and supported scaling leadership teams at Public as Chief of Staff to Co-CEOs/Head of People. Known for building operating cadences (MBRs, offsites), creating decision-driving templates, and executing high-stakes weeks combining board governance, CEO travel/client engagements, and external communications with strong discretion.”

“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.”

Dhaya Lakshminarayanan

Screened

Executive Operations Leader specializing in AI, climate tech, and high-growth organizations

San Francisco, CA20y exp

“Operator who has repeatedly stepped into founder-level, cross-functional ownership at startups—running full HR (recruiting, onboarding, benefits) with AI-driven process automation, and later serving as interim VP People & Culture during an executive transition. Also managed cap table, 409A, equity grants, and day-to-day investor relations, and built company-wide ELT goals/KPIs and operating rhythms tied to board-approved strategy.”

Sara Rubacha

Screened

Engineering Manager specializing in databases and distributed systems

Weston, FL21y exp

“Aspiring founder exploring an AI automation startup focused on automating processes involved in building companies. Not yet developed specific use cases or raised capital, but describes a clear plan to validate ideas through use-case research, building a pilot, and testing with early customers; not familiar with the VC/accelerator landscape yet.”

“Technologist drawn to venture studio/zero-to-one environments, motivated by owning technical architecture and building scalable systems from day one. Interested in rapidly shipping MVPs, iterating toward product-market fit, and validating ideas through real user feedback rather than pursuing entrepreneurship for its own sake.”

“Technology/architecture leader with Accenture experience delivering data- and AI/ML-driven products, including a legal contract search solution and customer sales analytics for AWS. Known for scaling distributed teams (onshore/offshore), making pragmatic architecture decisions, and solving hard data problems (proprietary sources, data quality) while implementing scalable integrations like Redshift-to-Salesforce via parallelized pipelines.”

“Operations/HR leader brought into an early-stage company to run a business unit and build HR from zero; drove 40% revenue growth and helped position the company for a buyout offer. Known for pragmatic process redesign (removing approval friction, centralizing contracts) and scaling people operations with tools like Pave and UKG, plus hands-on founder coaching using pilots and Theory of Constraints.”