Zack Cerza
Principal Software Engineer at IBM
Boulder, Colorado, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolZack Cerza is a Principal Software Engineer in Boulder with 12+ years building developer-focused test automation and CI/CD for large open source systems, most notably Ceph, a widely used distributed storage platform. He blends hands-on Python development with DevOps and infrastructure expertise, having moved and modernized entire test labs and streamlined build and CI systems for Red Hat and IBM. Zack excels at making complex distributed testing reliable and repeatable—authoring teuthology work that provisions and manages hundreds of test machines daily. He’s contributed to prominent repos like ceph/ceph and ocs-ci, improving build systems, CI, and failure diagnostics, and has a pragmatic interest in Rust, Go, and gRPC. Open-source stewardship and operational rigor define his approach, and he selectively pursues work aligned with privacy, climate, and social justice rather than fintech or crypto. Colleagues rely on him to bridge engineering, operations, and product needs to ship durable systems at scale.
12 years of coding experience
17 years of employment as a software developer
BS, Computer Engineering Technology, BS, Computer Engineering Technology at Northeastern University
English
Github Skills (24)
kubernetes10
docker10
continuous-integration10
pytest10
python10
storage10
cin10
distributed-systems10
dockers10
cicd10
data-storage10
automation10
automation-testing10
aws10
kubernetes-pods10
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
red-hat-storage/ocs-ci
May 2019 - Jan 2022
Role in this project:
DevOps Engineer & Automation Engineer
DevOps Engineer & Automation EngineerContributions:27 reviews, 162 commits, 97 PRs in 2 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Zack primarily focused on enhancing the Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) capabilities and test automation framework of the `ocs-ci` repository. They implemented changes to improve the test environment setup by configuring AWS credentials, pull secrets, and other CI-related configurations. The user also made significant changes to the testing framework, including modifying test configurations and integrating unit tests. Furthermore, the user addressed issues with the cluster deployment process, and introduced functionality to collect logs on deployment failures.
ceph/ceph
Jul 2013 - Oct 2022
Ceph is a distributed object, block, and file storage platform
Role in this project:DevOps Engineer & Software Engineer
DevOps Engineer & Software EngineerContributions:56 reviews, 955 commits, 132 PRs in 9 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Zack primarily contributed to the Ceph storage project by addressing infrastructure and build-related issues. They made changes to the `ceph-volume` utility to allow loop devices, a crucial feature for development. In addition to these, they addressed bugs and improved the build system and continuous integration tasks, streamlining the development process. They also added configuration options and fixed issues within Cephadm.
fusefile-storagecephstorageopenebs
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