Zach Leslie
Senior Software Engineer at Grafana Labs
Fort Collins, Colorado, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolZach Leslie is a senior software engineer based in Fort Collins, Colorado, with a decade-plus of hands-on experience building and operating distributed systems across roles in engineering and SRE. He currently focuses on backend development at Grafana Labs, contributing to high-volume projects like Grafana Tempo where he improved trace-searching, validation, and developer-facing tooling. Previously he combined SRE and DevOps practice at New Relic and Womply, bringing strong release management and infrastructure automation chops to production services. Zach balances code-level improvements with practical operational insight—refactoring query verification tooling and clarifying error messages to improve user and developer experience. His career shows a steady progression from systems and security roles into senior engineering, underpinned by a BS in Information Systems Security and an active open-source presence. Colleagues describe him as someone who loves shipping reliable systems and enjoys iterating toward perfection.
4 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
BS, Information Systems Security, BS, Information Systems Security at ITT Technical Institute
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
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Github Skills (13)
distributed-tracing10
kubernetes10
go10
helm10
back-end-development10
kubernetes-pods10
charts10
grpc9
yaml9
error-handling9
json8
testing8
devops8
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
grafana/tempo
Aug 2021 - Nov 2022
Grafana Tempo is a high volume, minimal dependency distributed tracing backend.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:879 reviews, 83 commits, 450 PRs in 1 year 4 months
Contributions summary:Zach's contributions primarily focused on improving the Grafana Tempo backend. Their work included implementing features to enhance trace searching capabilities within the Tempo service. This involved modifying the code to handle and validate trace IDs, as well as integrating changes to incorporate additional details when searching for traces. Furthermore, the user contributed to the refactoring of the Vulture tool, which is used for query verification, and they also improved existing error messages for better user experience.
opentelemetrytracingtempovolumebackend
grafana/helm-charts
Jul 2022 - Nov 2022
Role in this project:DevOps Engineer
DevOps EngineerContributions:164 reviews, 92 commits, 84 PRs in 4 months
Contributions summary:Zach primarily focused on updating the `README.md.gotmpl` files within the `tempo-distributed` and `tempo` charts. These updates included documenting and incorporating breaking changes related to chart upgrades, such as changes in affinity labels and the introduction of new features. The user also merged branches and bumped chart versions, indicating involvement in release management and dependency updates.
kubenetesgrafanahelm-charts
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