Zachary Smith 🌈

Engineering Manager

Seattle, Washington, United States15 yrs 9 mos experience
Highly Stable

Key Highlights

  • Led engineering teams at top tech companies.
  • Achieved significant improvements in payment processing reliability.
  • Expert in managing cross-functional teams and projects.
Stackforce AI infers this person is a Fintech and E-commerce expert with strong leadership in software engineering.

Contact

Skills

Core Skills

Project ManagementService OwnershipTechnical VisionSoftware Development

Other Skills

JavaPythonSQLAWS servicesAgileScrumPerlScalaJavaScriptHTML5CSSSoftware Development Life Cycle (SDLC)CommunicationCustomer ServiceData Analysis

About

I am a passionate technology leader well-versed in people management, project management, service ownership/operations, and leading cross-team/away team initiatives. I have experience building and managing roadmaps that span multiple product and engineering stakeholders, and I create mechanisms that enable an iterative approach to people and engineering management that gauges success and drives continuous improvement. Technical Experience: Java, Python, SQL, git, distributed systems, AWS services Management: Agile, Scrum, Project Management, Operations, Career Growth Planning and Coaching

Experience

15 yrs 9 mos
Total Experience
1 yr 11 mos
Average Tenure
1 yr
Current Experience

Netflix

Engineering Manager

May 2025 – Present · 1 yr · Seattle, WA · Remote

  • Member Experience Core Systems - Member Presentation Platform, Asset Personalization and Engagement Systems
  • My teams design and develop the scalable backend systems that power the hydration of personalized assets (artwork, trailers, synopses, badging, … ) across the core pages of the Netflix application. We are responsible for 1) orchestrating the hydration of personalized assets that help Netflix members navigate our large content library and discover new content, 2) validating the assets to be displayed on the Netflix application, 3) precompute and realtime personalization for Member Experience pages and 4) member inputs like MyLists and Thumbs ratings that help us understand member preferences and provide better recommendations and personalization.
JavaPythonSQLAWS servicesAgileScrum+2

Square

Engineering Lead

May 2022 – Apr 2025 · 2 yrs 11 mos · Seattle, Washington, United States · Remote

  • Led the engineering side of payment clearing, accounting automation, and balances, within Square’s Payment Platform organization. I owned the core platform infrastructure that is responsible for the payment lifecycle downstream of payment acceptance, and I owned the Balance Service Level Objective (SLO) that measures how quickly payments are cleared and funds are made available to customers across multiple downstream services and products.
  • Devised and led multiple initiatives across my team and upstream partner teams such as Payment Pricing & Cost Platform and Risk Platform to improve our reliability and cross domain architecture, resulting in a 85.7% year over year and 96.7% quarter over quarter (Q1 2025) reduction in payments that breach SLO.
  • Led my team through successful design, implementation, and launch of services that comprise the new payments stack that we are decomposing Square’s Ledger/Settlement monolith into. We migrated all read traffic to the new stack without incident and we are migrating all write traffic by the end of Q2 2025.
  • Coordinated with cross-team product and engineering stakeholders to lead my team in the launch of multiple high-impact products such as Gross Settlement, 1st and 3rd party Payment Balance APIs, accounting data quality improvements for merchants and 3rd party accounting integrations, and new payment method launches such as AfterPay In-Person & Online.
  • Primary responsibilities include: A) defining the technical vision for my team, B) working with partner teams and stakeholders (PM, TPM, CS) to build our roadmap and define requirements, C) overseeing Agile software development practices, D) creating healthy and proactive operational processes, E) identifying and executing on infrastructure cost optimizations, F) making prioritization decisions, and G) providing coaching and career development to engineers and other engineering managers.
JavaPythonSQLAgileProject ManagementTechnical Vision

Amazon

4 roles

Software Development Manager III

May 2021 – May 2022 · 1 yr

  • B2B Payments - B2B Invoicing
  • Led an engineering team (remotely with SDEs across the US and Canada) in B2B Payments to design and build the Payment APIs that enable a single integration point for Amazon’s businesses to orchestrate the invoice/deferred payment lifecycle for customers. We build novel deferred payment features that lower cost of payment for customers and reduce time spent on manual processes such as reconciliation.
  • Launched multiple new features such as EU VAT Consolidated Invoicing and new metrics instrumentation that surfaces actionable details enabling us to baseline and improve upon invoice quality and delivery.
  • Improved the operational process for the three teams within B2B Invoicing, resulting in a 61% reduction in the number of tickets and a 57% reduction in software risks/vulnerabilities, comparing averages before and after the process improvements.
  • Organized a customer engagement program with our product managers and business operations team that gives engineers opportunities to run demos for and speak directly with customers to understand their needs.
  • Served on the bar raiser group for diversity, equity, and inclusion for the B2B Payments organization.
  • Primary responsibilities include: A) defining the technical vision for my team, B) working with partner teams and stakeholders (PM, TPM, CS) to build our roadmap and define requirements, C) overseeing Agile software development practices, D) making prioritization decisions, E) defining project plans, F) tracking project progress, and G) providing coaching and career development to SDEs and other engineering managers.
  • Involved in hiring (100+ interviews), mentoring (2 SDMs and 1 senior SDE), and developing and promoting engineering leaders. Internal survey scores across manager, job, and team satisfaction are consistently in the top 10% of all engineering teams at Amazon.
JavaSQLAgileProject ManagementTechnical Vision

Sofware Development Manager III

Promoted

Aug 2019 – Apr 2021 · 1 yr 8 mos

  • Alexa Shopping International
  • Led an engineering team in Alexa Shopping with a backlog spread across 8 international stakeholders, delivering initiatives such as EU Multi-Factor Authentication (PSD2) for voice shopping in the EU, launching Alexa Shopping in Hindi in IN and Portuguese in BR, re-architecting the Where’s My Stuff feature to surface more fine grained shipping data from carriers, and improving Alexa’s responses to customers in non-English locales.
  • Owned and improved career growth planning for several teams within Alexa Shopping, coaching other engineering managers on career development best practices, and, in 2020, increasing the percentage of engineers who have documented career growth plans and quarterly career coaching sessions from 10% to 96% (54 people in total). Career growth sentiment from engineering satisfaction scores increased from 3.0 to 4.3 (out of 5) during this period.
  • Delivered an audio/visual interactive shopping cart for Amazon retail, Whole Foods, and Amazon Fresh carts, for Alexa screened devices, managing a tiger team and coordinating development across several partner team services to launch in April 2021. Since launch we saw an increase of 9.3% in on-device purchase completions on Alexa screened devices in the US that are directly attributable to our audio/visual cart experience.
JavaAgileProject ManagementTechnical Vision

Software Development Manager II

Apr 2019 – Aug 2019 · 4 mos

  • B2B Payments - Payments Acceptance
  • Led an engineering team responsible for providing businesses of all sizes across a myriad of industries the ability to purchase on Amazon Business using their preferred choices of payment that are aligned with their existing financial controls, launching payment features such as ACH as a payment method to pay PayByInvoice invoices in the US and direct debit as a payment method to pay PayByInvoice invoices in Germany.
JavaAgileProject Management

Software Development Engineer II

Oct 2017 – Apr 2019 · 1 yr 6 mos

  • B2B Payments - Payments Acceptance (tech lead)
  • Designed, implemented, and launched the ability to use SEPA direct debit for procurement delegation for Amazon Business customers in Germany, working as an away team engineer across multiple backend services, primarily in Java, Perl, and Scala, to enable businesses to share their direct debit across multiple requisitioners and to enable admins to add, edit, and delete direct debit payment instruments.
  • Designed, implemented, and launched EU Payment Services Directive 2 (PSD2) core compliance and purchase loss mitigation CX for Amazon Business, working as an away team engineer in the Business Approval team’s services to queue Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) challenges for purchases where the payment method owner was not the requisitioner making the purchase.
  • Designed, implemented, and launched a post-settlement dunning/collections solution for direct debit failure after success scenarios in the EU.
  • Designed, implemented, and launched the ability for customers to use PayByInvoice as a payment method to pay for BusinessPrime subscriptions in Germany, working as an away team engineer in Tax data assemblers to enable purchase of a digital item by PayByInvoice.
  • Launched Amazon Payments Experience widgets on Manage Your Business Payments page in US, DE, UK, FR, IT, ES, and JP, providing customers with a consistent payments experience across Your Account, Checkout, and Manage Your Business pages.
  • Performed data analysis with Transaction Risk Management and Amazon Lending to build the project roadmap for the Amazon Business Payments fraud initiatives.
  • Managed the Consumer Payments 2018 Summer Intern program.
  • Redesigned ABP Acceptance team sprints and project planning using Agile techniques.
  • Won multiple org-wide engineering awards such as Amazon Business Payments 2018 Hackathon winner and Amazon Business Payments 2018 all hands SDE award.
JavaPerlScalaTechnical Vision

Seesaw learning

Fullstack Software Engineer

Feb 2016 – Sep 2017 · 1 yr 7 mos · San Francisco

  • Implemented an email verification system that involved building an integration with the Facebook Graph API to allow users to associate themselves with a physical school. I later used this data to associate users with schools and districts which led to increased license sales and allowed for more targeted advertising and support.
  • Built an integration with the Salesforce REST API that synchronizes our data with the data in our salesforce instance, which improved timing and personalization for district account renewals, email targeting, and advertising. I also used this integration when building our ambassador application, automating the application process and saving our schools team an immense amount of time.
  • Designed and implemented a web training UI that hosts courses and delivers content to users wanting to improve their ability use our product and get professional development credits for their career. As part of this, I implemented an integration with the Versal eLearning API that allows our teacher success team to build courses, manage course content and view user progress through each of the courses.
  • Built a historic data access feature for premium users, using ElasticSearch facet queries and filters to make viewing historic student data easy and intuitive.
  • Created a notification center and notification widget to keep users up to date with activity in their classes.
  • Implemented a csv importer that parses and imports a school’s educational standards data into the system, allowing teachers to meaningfully track student progress in the teacher application. In addition, I constructed an administrative dashboard for the paid product that allows admins to visualize and manipulate this standards data.
JavaJavaScriptHTML5CSSSoftware Development

Hosie rice llp.

Paralegal

Oct 2014 – May 2015 · 7 mos · San Francisco Bay Area

  • -Analyzed research publications, patents, and computer code, using USPTO PAIR, git/GitHub, and SVN, in the process of drafting patent valuations and aiding attorney in recommending the best course of action to clients

The berkeley review mcat prep

Instructor

Sep 2013 – May 2015 · 1 yr 8 mos · Berkeley, California

  • Wrote and presented lectures and practice problems to teach students how to succeed on the chemistry and organic chemistry sections of the MCAT exam.
  • Developed intricate, passage-style problems in the areas bio-inorganic chemistry, organic chemistry, and biochemistry.

Uc berkeley college of chemistry

2 roles

NIH Bridge Instructor

Aug 2013 – May 2014 · 9 mos · Berkeley, California

  • Developed and ran teaching sessions for community college students from disadvantaged backgrounds to help them succeed and gain admission to a four year university. This was part of the UC Berkeley NIH Bridge outreach program.
  • I taught General Chemistry 1 and 2, Organic Chemistry 1 and 2, Calculus 1-3, Differential Equations, and Linear Algebra

Research Assistant (Bertozzi Group)

Jan 2013 – Sep 2014 · 1 yr 8 mos · Berkeley, California

  • Designed and synthesized novel bio-orthogonal phosphine-luciferin tags for bioluminescence imaging of luciferace-expressing cancer cells in zebrafish.
  • Designed and synthesized bio-orthogonal, multi-modal (MRI and fluorescent) nanoprobes capable of attaching to metabolically azide-labeled cell surfaces via BARAC Cu-free Click chemistry
  • Synthesized azide-functionalized carbohydrates to metabolically label zebrafish and Mycobacterium smegmatis.
  • Utilized an iterative approach, combining analysis of technical historic literature, reaction yields, and identification/purity by NMR/Mass Spectrometry, to engineer efficient reactions leading to desired products.

California department of toxic substance control

Lab Assistant

Aug 2012 – Apr 2014 · 1 yr 8 mos · Berkeley, California

  • Worked on the development of a novel method for identification and quantification of HOBDE’s in human serum utilizing solid-phase extraction with HPLC-MS/MS to aid in determining the effects of consumer brominated flame retardants on humans
  • Scrutinized large data sets using modern statistical techniques such as regression analysis and standardization to validate and calibrate method development parameters.

Zts personal fitness

Owner / Operator

Jan 2009 – Jul 2012 · 3 yrs 6 mos · Redondo Beach, California

  • Started and managed the financial, advertising, and programming aspects of a personal training business, serving a diverse clientele in Southern California.
  • Utilized client data and accepted training methodologies to develop personal fitness programs, aiding clients in attaining their personal fitness goals.
  • Held specialized certifications in Russian kettlebell training and corrective exercise.

Equinox

Certified Personal Trainer

Jan 2008 – Jan 2009 · 1 yr · Palos Verdes, California

Education

University of California, Berkeley

Bachelor of Science (B.S.) — Chemical Biology

Jan 2014 – Present

Hack Reactor

Front-End Software Engineering

Jan 2015 – Present

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