Platform and legacy modernization
Evolving important systems without destabilizing the business that depends on them, including service decomposition, incremental replacement, technical-debt reduction, and safer deployment practices.
Staff / Principal Software Engineer · Software Architect
I modernize software platforms that businesses cannot afford to get wrong.
I’m a hands-on engineer and architect with 17+ years of experience across SaaS platforms, AWS, Kubernetes, distributed backend systems, and long-lived legacy applications. I lead difficult technical initiatives while remaining close enough to the code and infrastructure to make the decisions work in production.
Open to Staff/Principal engineering roles and select contract engagements.
SaaS modernization AWS and Kubernetes Backend platforms Production reliability
17+ years in software engineeringAWS and Kubernetes modernizationGo, Python, PHP, and TypeScriptArchitecture through production operations
How I work
Difficult systems. Practical engineering.
My best work happens where architecture, implementation, and operational reality meet.
I have helped teams migrate production platforms to AWS and Kubernetes, modernize legacy SaaS applications, remove major processing bottlenecks, improve authentication and multi-tenant identity systems, strengthen security controls, and introduce practical AI capabilities.
I am not a strategy-only architect. I work in the codebase, infrastructure, deployment pipelines, observability systems, and technical decisions required to produce a durable result.
Areas of focus
Where hands-on technical leadership is most useful.
AWS and Kubernetes infrastructure
Designing and implementing maintainable cloud environments, infrastructure automation, deployment systems, networking, observability, and production operating practices.
Backend and distributed systems
Building and improving APIs, asynchronous workflows, processing pipelines, authentication systems, and multi-tenant application architecture.
Reliability and operational improvement
Removing performance bottlenecks, improving deployment confidence, reducing recurring failure modes, and making systems easier for engineering teams to understand and operate.
Practical AI implementation
Applying AI where it produces a measurable engineering or product outcome, not adding AI terminology to work that does not need it.
Selected work
Selected engineering outcomes.
99.67% improvement in search speed
Search performanceApplied LLM-based search strategies to an enterprise RFP platform, significantly improving result relevance while increasing search speed by 99.67%.
Read case study100× processing-performance improvement
Processing performanceReworked a critical processing path in a high-volume SaaS messaging system, restoring operating headroom and improving responsiveness.
Read case studyProduction migration from colocation to AWS EKS
Cloud modernizationPlayed a central technical role in replatforming a long-lived SaaS platform using AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, and modern deployment practices while maintaining continuity for active operations.
Read case studyMulti-minute workflows reduced to near real time
Near-real-time workflowsImproved transaction and customer-ingestion workflows that previously took minutes to process, producing substantially faster operational feedback.
View selected workExperience
Experience across SaaS, cloud infrastructure, and enterprise systems.
My experience includes technical leadership and hands-on engineering at Proposal Technologies, Wolfe/GiftYa, Zingle and Medallia, CBS Interactive, The Smyth Group, and earlier product and ecommerce organizations.
I have worked through acquisitions, infrastructure migrations, major modernization efforts, security audits, rapid organizational growth, and the less visible operational work required to keep established platforms running.
View resume
About
An engineer who stays close to the work.
I move between architecture diagrams, Terraform, code review, production operations, and the tradeoffs that make a technical decision hold up over time.
Senior roles
Hiring for a senior technical role?
I am best suited to Staff Engineer, Principal Engineer, Lead Platform Engineer, and Software Architect roles where architectural responsibility remains connected to hands-on implementation.
View resumeSelective consulting
Facing a difficult technical initiative?
I accept a limited number of contract and fractional engagements involving platform modernization, cloud infrastructure, backend architecture, reliability, and technically difficult delivery work.
Review consulting fitContact
Good engineering decisions have to survive production.
Hiring for a senior engineering role? Send the job description and a little context about the team and what the role is expected to own.
Have a technical initiative? Tell me what's happening, why it matters, and what you're trying to accomplish.
Prefer email? zach.quintana@gmail.com