About Me
Hey, I'm Zach. I'm a Staff Platform Engineer at Capsule with an SDET background, building core infrastructure, internal tooling, workflow orchestration, and sustainable test systems that largely maintain themselves.
I started in QA at Epic, fell in love with the problem-solving mindset, and taught myself to code—eventually moving from writing test automation to building the platforms that power it.
Outside of work, you'll find me taking photography or improv classes, cooking something new, or helping run the Chicago Seleniumistas Meetup Group.
Experience
AI & ARCHITECTURAL INITIATIVES
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Architected a security-hardened MCP proxy to gate 3rd-party and internal AI interactions, implementing automated PII/PHI redaction, prompt injection protection, and RBAC/ABAC for enterprise compliance
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Built an AI voice agent to automate patient onboarding, significantly reducing operational overhead while improving medication routing accuracy
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Led the migration of mission-critical workflows from a legacy in-house solution to Temporal Cloud, establishing a repeatable framework for all distributed services
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Engineered message-interception middleware for SNS, SQS, and Kafka to facilitate consumer-driven contract testing and support the transition to a Saga-based architecture
QUALITY ENGINEERING & PLATFORM TOOLING
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Spearheaded Capsule's first E2E test suite (Python, Pytest, Playwright) — Release Gate for 20+ daily deployments, reducing production incidents by 75%
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Developed an internal data orchestration tool enabling engineers to instantly provision specific test scenarios, standardizing manual QA enterprise-wide
TECHNICAL LEADERSHIP & INFRASTRUCTURE
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Instituted Capsule's first formal QA process and hired a team of 3 QA engineers, codifying unified test-quality metrics across the organization
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Directed cross-functional infrastructure lifecycles, including major Spring Boot 3 and Django upgrades for all core services
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Scaled E2E suite (Ruby, RSpec, Selenium) from 15 hours of parallelized execution to 7 minutes of wall-clock time by migrating to a self-managed Kubernetes Selenium Grid
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Accelerated 3rd-party API verification by developing a custom Sinatra/Redis mock server with a dependency injection pattern for the core application
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Orchestrated ephemeral cloud testing environments, reducing critical bugs by 30% YoY and directly supporting the company's acquisition by InMoment
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Managed QA and DevOps departments, overseeing 3 direct reports and setting strategic roadmaps for infrastructure and quality
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Validated system resilience for 3× peak traffic on critical endpoints by architecting load tests with Python and Locust
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Deployed and maintained the first CI/CD browser-testing pipeline at Jellyvision, integrating automated quality gates into the standard deployment flow
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Reduced automated test runtime by 50% through refactoring core engineering practices and optimizing wait-state logic
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Engineered the analytics team's first E2E test suite using BrowserMob Proxy to validate real-time event tracking and data integrity
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Developed the first integration tests for an ETL pipeline (AWS Firehose, Lambda, CouchDB), ensuring compliance with SLAs for critical customer analytics data
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Organized the walk-in, ground meat daily, cooked all house stocks
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Prepped ingredients and recipes for a 35+ item menu
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Completed the Intro to Programming and Full Stack Nanodegrees while working as a chef
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Validated core backend APIs for batch scheduling, indexing, and HA failover systems using the Caché programming language
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Automated project grading for the education team by developing a custom scripting utility to streamline internal review processes
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Managed the RCA process for high-priority technical issues, coordinating resolutions for low-level system failures affecting patient care
Speaking
2021
Appium Conference
2021
RabbitMQ Summit
2020
Testing United
2020
SeleniumConf India
Selenium For All - Setting Your Team Up For Success So Anyone Can Understand and Write Tests
This talk was also presented at the Berlin Continuous Testing Meetup
2019
Quest For Quality
2019
AgileTestingDays Chicago
2018
SeleniumConf India
2018
The Ruby Testing Podcast by Jason Swett
Stories
Automation Fun
Run this page through an automation tool — it detects which one you're using and serves a custom haiku. Pick your tool and language below to get a script to run.
👤
Human detected
No automation tool found. Run a script below and reload.
1. Install Playwright and create file:
pip install playwrightplaywright installtouch playwright_fun.py2. Save the script below to playwright_fun.py
3. Run the script:
python playwright_fun.pyplaywright_fun.py
# File: playwright_fun.py
# Language: Python
from playwright.sync_api import sync_playwright
import getpass, os
with sync_playwright() as p:
browser = p.firefox.launch(headless=False)
context = browser.new_context()
context.add_cookies([
{"name": "automation_user", "value": getpass.getuser(), "url": "https://zattas.me"},
{"name": "automation_language", "value": "python", "url": "https://zattas.me"}
])
page = context.new_page()
try:
page.goto("https://zattas.me")
page.set_viewport_size({"width": 1920, "height": 1080})
input("Press Enter to close browser...")
finally:
browser.close()
os._exit(0)