amazon-engineer
(2)
Vivek Ravisankar
Vivek Ravisankar is the co-founder and CEO of HackerRank, the technical hiring platform he started in 2012 after leaving a developer job at Amazon. Frustrated by the hours engineers lost to unstructured interviews, he and co-founder Hari Karunanidhi built a way to measure programming skill directly. After several pivots and three tries at Y Combinator, HackerRank grew into a platform used by thousands of companies and millions of developers. Ravisankar's stated mission is to build a meritocracy in hiring, where a developer's skills matter more than their school, geography, or resume brands.
David Zagaynov
David Zagaynov is the CEO and co-founder of Poseidon Aerospace, a San Francisco aerospace startup building unmanned, runway-independent cargo aircraft. A UC Berkeley computer science graduate and former Amazon software engineer, he co-founded the company in 2023 with Parker Tenney and Isaac Baumstark around a shared obsession with the ekranoplan, a Soviet Cold War boat-plane that skimmed just above the water. Poseidon is developing the Heron seaplane and the Egret short-takeoff aircraft, each designed to haul up to two tons of cargo over 1,500 miles. The company raised an $11 million seed round in November 2025 led by Tamarack Global, after a $1.4 million pre-seed led by Starship Ventures.