Zach Carlson
Sr. Cloud Engineer at Rialtic
Chicago, Illinois, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolZach Carlson is a Sr. Cloud Engineer with 17 years of experience building low-level systems, infrastructure, and cloud-native services from Chicago. He thrives across the full stack—from kernel and protocol work to APIs and production automation—and has a knack for solving unusual engineering problems. At New Relic and other companies he led platform and DevOps efforts, and now applies that depth to cloud engineering at Rialtic. Zach is an active contributor to libimobiledevice and libplist, where his protocol-level fixes and threading improvements enable reliable communication with iOS devices. Comfortable with C/C++ and Linux internals as well as modern cloud tooling, he blends systems programming discipline with pragmatic operational experience. Colleagues rely on him for hard-to-reproduce debugging and creative compatibility solutions that bridge first-party services and third-party clients.
17 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
Associate's degree Cybercrime, Associate's degree Cybercrime at Kaplan Career Institute-Pittsburgh
Github Skills (24)
lockdown10
filesystem10
c-language10
ios10
lib10
memory-management10
c1110
file-operations10
standard-library10
c1710
low-level-programming10
fileio10
file-handling10
plist10
protocols10
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
libimobiledevice/libplist
Jul 2008 - Oct 2008
A library to handle Apple Property List format in binary or XML
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:8 commits in 2 months
Contributions summary:Zach primarily contributed to the core functionality of the `libplist` library, demonstrating a focus on low-level programming with C/C++. Their commits included adding support for newer firmware versions, fixing bugs related to data handling within the AFC framework, and implementing directory manipulation, file operations, and binary plist support. The changes directly impacted how the library interacts with Apple devices and how it processes plist data.
cppplistxmlhandleapple
libimobiledevice/libimobiledevice
Mar 2009 - Mar 2009
A cross-platform protocol library to communicate with iOS devices
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1 commit in 1 day
Contributions summary:Zach primarily contributed to the AFC (Apple File Conduit) library, focusing on low-level communication with iOS devices. They implemented and debugged core functionalities such as file operations (open, read, write, delete, rename), directory listing, and device information retrieval. Their work involved protocol-level interactions and modifications to handle different firmware versions, indicating a deep understanding of the underlying communication protocols. They also added threading/locking to the code.
lockdowndprotocolcommunicatelibimobiledeviceios
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