Overview & philosophy
Zach’s work sits at the intersection of product delivery and platform hygiene: features ship, but not at the expense of security patches, dependency updates, or a clear story for the next engineer who opens the solution six months later.
He has spent the majority of his career in B2B SaaS and internal platform teams—environments where regressions are expensive and schema changes must be reversible. That background shows up in how he sequences migrations, how he names and versions APIs, and how he negotiates scope with product when a “small change” would silently double coupling.
On a typical week you will find him pairing on a tricky EF mapping, tightening an OpenAPI document so mobile clients stop guessing, or writing a short runbook for a new background job. He prefers thin vertical slices over horizontal layers that cannot be demonstrated to stakeholders.
“Zach is the person we put on the ticket when the bug report says ‘intermittent’ and the dashboard says nothing—he stays with it until the graph tells a story.” — Engineering lead, B2B SaaS (anonymized client reference)
Technical depth
Below is a structured view of where Zach spends depth time—not a buzzword list, but the kinds of problems he is used to owning.
APIs & boundaries
Data & EF Core
Azure & operations
- App Service deployment slots, configuration by environment, and secret rotation via Key Vault.
- Application Insights: custom metrics, dependency tracking, and actionable alert rules.
- Container images for worker services when App Service is not the right fit.
- CI pipelines (Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions) with quality gates: tests, analyzers, SBOM where required.
Security & quality
- JWT and OIDC with Entra ID / Auth0; refresh and silent-renew considerations for SPAs.
- OWASP-style reviews on new endpoints; least-privilege managed identities.
- Unit and integration tests with meaningful names—not coverage for coverage’s sake.
Tools & platforms (representative)
Representative project types
These are categories of work Zach has repeatedly delivered—not a claim about any single public brand. Use them to judge fit against your roadmap.
Multi-tenant SaaS APIs
Tenant resolution, per-tenant configuration, background billing and usage metering, admin impersonation flows handled safely.
Legacy strangler paths
Incremental extraction from monoliths: façade APIs, shared auth, duplicate-write phases, and cutover checklists.
Internal developer platforms
Templates for new services, golden paths for logging and health checks, and docs that stay next to the code.
Engagement models
Zach can plug into your existing ceremonies or help you tighten them. Typical commercial shapes look like the following—exact commercials are confirmed after a short discovery call.
| Model | Minimum | Best when… |
|---|---|---|
| Dedicated monthly | Often 3+ months | You need a stable senior IC embedded in your squad with predictable capacity. |
| Milestone / sprint | Project-based | Scope is bounded (e.g., new service + migration + handover in one quarter). |
| Advisory + implementation | 2–6 weeks intensive | You want architecture review, a PoC, and a written target-state before scaling the team. |
Repos, boards, Azure subscriptions, and security expectations aligned in the first week. Non-goals documented explicitly.
Thin vertical slices to staging/prod with feature flags, demos that show user-visible value, and retro action items that actually close.
Load checks on critical paths, runbooks, dashboards, and optional shadow support after go-live.
Ways of working with your team
Product & design: Zach asks for acceptance criteria in testable form, surfaces hidden coupling early, and pushes back politely when a deadline would force shortcuts that create debt your team will pay for all year.
QA: He collaborates on contract tests and meaningful test data; he does not treat QA as a gate at the end of a waterfall. Bugs get reproduction steps, severity, and owner in the ticket body.
Platform / DevOps: He writes infrastructure requests as tickets with rationale—what, why, blast radius, rollback—not as vague “please deploy” messages.
Tip: the fastest way to get a useful proposal is to share your repo layout (or a Loom), current pain (latency, incidents, or delivery speed), and what “good” looks like in 90 days.
Fit, boundaries & quick answers
- • Need a senior IC to anchor API design and Azure operations.
- • Want EF-heavy domains with disciplined migrations and reviews.
- • Value long-term maintainability and clear written decisions.
- • Require exclusive legacy WebForms with no modernization path.
- • Expect 100% on-site without hybrid flexibility.
- • Primary roadmap is non-.NET with only occasional touchpoints.
How quickly can Zach ramp on our codebase?
Most teams see meaningful commits in the first week after read-only access and a guided walkthrough. Complex domains may add a short spike for modeling only.
Does he work in our time zone?
He maintains overlap with US Eastern and can align part of the day with EU teams. Exact windows are agreed in the SOW.
Can he join our on-call rotation?
By arrangement, for services he owns or co-owns—with runbooks and alerting tuned first. Not all engagements include 24/7 on-call.
Ready to add Zach to your squad?
Tell us about your .NET roadmap, team size, and timeline—we’ll respond with next steps, sample week-one plan, and availability.