About Zach

What I do

My job, in two sentences: figure out where a business or system is not working, and fix it. Usually with software. Often with AI. Occasionally with a whiteboard and a Sharpie. I have been doing this for about twenty years and I still like it.

How I got here

I taught myself BASIC on a TI-83 in eighth grade, mostly because the manual was sitting in the box. I worked through it, hit the calculator's limits, and started writing assembly to keep going. By high school I was building consumer websites in Flash and PHP for whoever asked. None of it was planned. It stuck anyway.

My first real production codebase was at Catalytic Design, a small PHP shop in San Luis Obispo. The work was unglamorous. Optimize a slow database. Refactor a legacy procedural codebase that nobody wanted to touch. Deploy a site without taking it offline. I learned more there in six months than in any class I sat through.

I worked at Best Buy for six years after that. Started as a seasonal cashier and ended up running the store's demo systems, the WiFi, and most of the internal tooling. I built department tools through Best Buy's ETK program, an HTML5 plus PHP iPad app that replaced the paper customer-qualification packets, and I flew to Minnesota a few times as a member of the Car Audio Council, which is how Kicker Audio ended up in the Best Buy assortment. There were always small systems nobody was bothering to fix. I kept fixing them.

Ten years at Keiser

Keiser Corporation hired me in 2012 to customize their Sugar CRM. That assignment lasted maybe six months. Then the company started building Bluetooth-enabled fitness equipment and I ended up leading the technical side. I represented Keiser on the Bluetooth SIG Health and Fitness Working Group, flew to Amsterdam a few times, and helped write the FTMS GATT specification that is now the industry standard for connected fitness machines. I shipped the Keiser M3i, one of the earliest Bluetooth 4.0 consumer devices on the market (it sold a couple hundred thousand units). Ten years in, I had built and was running Software Engineering, IT, Electrical Engineering, and Digital Marketing, and I was leading engineering on the most ambitious connected-strength platform the company ever attempted.

Optum and Kaweah Tech

In 2022 I left Keiser for Rally Health. Optum bought Rally within days of my start, and I have been there ever since. The first big thing I led at Optum was the Directory Modernization Team. We tore out a weekly batch provider data pipeline and replaced it with a continuous Kafka stream. The new pipeline processes 3.2 million provider updates a day, cut the latency from two weeks down to four hours, and serves 1.7 million providers to about 50 million members. We landed it a week ahead of schedule, with zero downtime, and saved Optum roughly $1.2 million a month in processing costs. These days I lead engineering on the Manage and Receive Care platform: appointment management, the referral management app, and an AI voice agent that calls doctors' offices to book appointments so members do not have to sit on hold.

In 2023 I founded Kaweah Tech, an AI and software consultancy for businesses in California's Central Valley. We built Fertilytics, the RAG-driven fertilizer scheduling tool we made for Farmer's Fertilizer; the Work Order Management system that runs R.M. King's cotton picker head rework operations in Fresno and Moultrie; and a robotics path-optimization study for an early-stage agriculture startup. We also ship two products of our own: Signal Fire Games (free games for Christian youth groups) and Licentio (a licensure tracker for therapy professionals, launching in 2026).

Around the community

Outside the day-to-day engineering work I advise founders through the Valley Community SBDC, sit on the Engineering Advisory Board at Mission Oak Academy of Engineering, and mentor at Tulare and Visalia CTE Pathways, VPIE, and CSET Youth Programs. In 2025 I spoke at five student events and reached about 260 high schoolers across the Central Valley. In March 2026 I led a workshop called AI Without the Hype, for small-business operators trying to figure out whether AI actually belongs anywhere in their operations.