Zach Cotter
Principal Software Engineer at Forward Financing
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolZach Cotter is a Principal Software Engineer based in San Francisco with 11 years of experience building scalable web platforms and APIs. He has led backend architecture and performance optimizations for high-traffic sites—designing Rails APIs and caching strategies that supported millions of monthly page views and spikes of thousands of requests per minute. At Forward Financing he progressed from software engineer to principal, pairing hands-on coding with system-level design and delivery. Past roles at America's Test Kitchen and earlier co-op positions show a full-stack fluency (Rails, React, PostgreSQL, Python, C#) and a knack for reducing technical debt and radically speeding up test suites. He’s also prototyped machine-learning features such as a collaborative-filtering recommendation engine, reflecting a curiosity for data-driven product features. Outside work he showcases projects at zachcotter.com, signaling an active interest in sharing technical work beyond day-to-day engineering.
11 years of coding experience
3 years of employment as a software developer
BS Computer Science and Environmental Science, BS Computer Science and Environmental Science at Northeastern University
Stackoverflow
207reputation
55kreached
8answers
2questions
Github Skills (77)
blueprint9
ruby8
rails8
ruby-on-rails7
audit7
sass7
react7
activerecord6
excel6
postgresql6
powershell6
database6
python6
concurrently6
typescript6
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
zcotter/sousvide
Mar 2016 - Oct 2018
Temperature feedback controller for DIY sous vide machine
Contributions:2 PRs, 19 pushes, 2 branches in 2 years 6 months
feedback-controllercontrollerdiyfeedbacktemperature
ForwardFinancing/ach
Jul 2018 - Nov 2022
Helper for building ACH files in Ruby
Contributions:6 pushes, 3 branches, 2 comments in 4 years 4 months
railsachruby
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