John Zila
Co-Founder And Chief Architect at Watt Data
Nashville-Davidson, Tennessee, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJohn Zila is a founder and architect with 15 years building secure, scalable systems across startups and large enterprises, currently leading product and platform engineering as Co-Founder and Chief Architect at Watt Data. He co-founded Inkbloom and architected a model-agnostic LLM pipeline that analyzes manuscripts across dozens of literary dimensions in a single API call, and launched a CI/CD-backed SaaS within months. Previously at Zoom (via Keybase) he built and scaled Security DevOps from a handful to a 25-person organization, delivering secrets management, policy-as-code, and zero-trust tooling for thousands of services. Deeply hands-on in backend and DevOps, his open-source work includes improving test reliability and CLI/process scaling in the notable Flynn PaaS repo and optimizing the Keybase prefetcher and disk block cache. Comfortable moving between low-level systems and product-facing ML services, he combines cryptographic, distributed-systems, and operational expertise to ship secure, production-grade platforms. Based in Nashville and educated at the University of Waterloo, he pairs entrepreneurial drive with a track record of rapid delivery and infrastructure craftsmanship.
15 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Software Engineering Software Engineering, Bachelor of Software Engineering Software Engineering at University of Waterloo
English
Stackoverflow
724reputation
75kreached
32answers
3questions
Github Skills (17)
testing10
prefetch10
go10
cli10
devops9
logging9
build-automation8
cicd8
debug8
documentation7
html6
templating6
expression6
bash6
perl6
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
keybase/client
Nov 2015 - May 2020
Keybase Go Library, Client, Service, OS X, iOS, Android, Electron
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Back-end Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:2055 commits, 667 PRs, 1759 pushes in 4 years 6 months
Contributions summary:John primarily focused on optimizing and documenting the prefetcher module in the Keybase client repository, including minimizing log messages. They made code changes to the libkbfs/prefetcher.go and libkbfs/block_retrieval_queue.go files. Their contributions included documentation updates and implementing improvements to disk block cache operations. They also worked on refactoring the code, as well as fixing a few flakes in the prefetcher test.
golangreactelectronreact-nativeclient-library
flynn/flynn
Oct 2014 - Oct 2015
[UNMAINTAINED] A next generation open source platform as a service (PaaS)
Role in this project:Back-end & DevOps Engineer
Back-end & DevOps EngineerContributions:22 commits, 30 PRs, 17 pushes in 11 months
Contributions summary:John's contributions primarily involve refactoring and improving the testing infrastructure within the `flynn/flynn` repository. This includes separating test assertions for success and output content, indicating a focus on test reliability. The user also implemented and modified the CLI, ensuring correct process scaling. Furthermore, the user worked on updating the setup script.
next-generationpaasdockeras-a-serviceplatform-as-a-service
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