Zac Hester
Vice President Of Engineering at Highlands Defense, LLC
Greater Colorado Springs Area United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolZac Hester is a pragmatic engineering executive with 12+ years leading teams across aerospace, defense, and advanced technology, currently scaling agentic generative and computer-vision capabilities as VP of Engineering at Compound Eye. He specializes in turning program- or R&D-driven efforts into repeatable product organizations—establishing delivery predictability, compliance, and budget governance while protecting system reliability without relying on heroics. Zac combines hands-on technical depth in embedded systems, DSP/SDR, remote sensing, and real-time processing with strong executive and customer communication, proposal development, and cybersecurity experience. He has repeatedly built resilient engineering cultures that perform through shifting mission priorities and limited specifications, favoring data-driven decisions and modern tooling (including assistant technologies) to increase leverage. Outside corporate roles he runs small businesses in defense training and precision manufacturing, reflecting a practical maker’s mindset that complements his systems engineering background.
12 years of coding experience
21 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelors, Computer Engineering, Bachelors, Computer Engineering at South Dakota Mines
Stackoverflow
11reputation
3kreached
2answers
1question
Github Skills (7)
textmate6
dictionary6
python6
mysql6
vim-plugin3
neovim2
vim2
Programming languages (1)
Github contributions (5)
zhester/vim-hz
Jul 2014 - Dec 2017
Contributions:99 commits, 67 pushes in 3 years 5 months
zhester/hzpy
Aug 2013 - Feb 2017
Contributions:107 commits, 32 pushes in 3 years 6 months
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.