Frontend-led product engineering · Applied AI · TypeScript
Zachary Carlin
Senior Software Engineer · Frontend Technical Lead & Applied-AI Systems Builder
I own frontend from architecture to shipped product — and I build the AI systems that ship with it. Eight years building and modernizing data-rich web platforms in TypeScript, React, Next.js, and Node.js, across teams from 3-person startups to 100+ companies; currently the frontend technical lead for a B2B financial-data product. I also design, deploy, and operate production applied-AI systems end-to-end: a live MCP server, a ChatGPT plugin, an AI chat widget, and private AI reliability infrastructure — not demos, systems I run.
The Fly (Main Street Data) · Senior Software Engineer
Frontend technical authority on a B2B financial-data platform — direction, delivery, and the build, from Figma through tested production.
Joined Main Street Data at its founding as a 3-person startup; the company was later acquired by a larger international (Israel-based) company and is now The Fly (50+).
Built and operate the MCP server at mcp.thefly.com, exposing The Fly as tools agents can call — production MCP tooling.
Built a ChatGPT plugin for The Fly, bringing the platform's market data and research directly into ChatGPT conversations.
Built the product's AI chat widget end-to-end, including streaming responses, retrieval grounding, and human-gated behavior.
Added automatic code review to the delivery flow, so every change ships with review and CI/CD gates before it can land.
Improved the CI/CD pipeline — faster, more reliable builds and gated promotion — across the frontend and API surfaces.
Modernized frontend quality controls (ESLint flat config, stricter checks, type-debt tracking) and led the Next.js pages-to-app-router migration with server-side rendering to cut initial-load latency.
Sonobi · Senior Software Engineer
Frontend engineer at Sonobi, a digital ad-buying platform (100+ people) — built and maintained its React applications, modernizing legacy class components to hooks and async product flows.
Migrated legacy jQuery product flows to maintainable React components.
Integrated React features with PHP and Python services and optimized GraphQL / Postgres-backed API and database paths.
Contributed to Prebid.js — the open-source ad-bidding standard — and ran day-to-day engineering coordination.
Dogwood Logic · Software Engineer
Software engineer at Dogwood (10+ people) — implemented decentralized identifiers and verifiable credentials in Node.js and TypeScript.
Built Vue.js interfaces for encrypted healthcare applications using test-driven development and user-flow simulation.
Gulf Photonics · Software Engineer
Lead developer at Gulf Photonics (5+ people) for an IoT embedded sensor for fermentation monitoring using photonics — shipped to accubrew.io — plus its web dashboard.
Built Node.js / Vue interfaces and APIs and managed MongoDB and Firebase across desktop and mobile.
Independent Engineering
Z4C & AI Reliability Systems · Owner / Product Engineer / Operator
Design, build, deploy, and operate a customer-facing platform (React, TypeScript, Cloudflare) end-to-end — timezone-aware intake, concurrency-safe storage, abuse protection, analytics, automated tests, production verification on every change. z4cllc.com is live and verifiable.
Build and operate private AI workflow and evaluation infrastructure: deterministic evaluations, regression comparison, redaction of persisted output, human-gated promotion with rollback awareness. Production agent tooling.
Own both systems end-to-end — architecture, code, deployment, and day-to-day operation.