Summary
Zack Kitzmiller is a founding partner and seasoned engineering leader with 16 years building fault-tolerant, high-traffic distributed systems, particularly in payments and retail IoT. He has led architecture and resilience efforts at companies like SeatGeek and Grabango, designing payment, fraud, and marketplace systems that processed billions in transactions and scaled to hundreds of thousands of ops per minute. Comfortable across Elixir, Go, Python and Swift (and fluent in legacy stacks like PHP/RoR), he blends hands-on backend work with cloud and Kubernetes infrastructure design. An active open-source contributor, he helped shape popular projects like the Sixpack A/B testing framework and improved Go middleware in negroni, reflecting a focus on pragmatic, reusable tooling. Based in Chicago, he pairs product-oriented engineering with a hardware-hacking curiosity and a habit of building delightfully unnecessary side projects.
16 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
Computer Science, Computer Science at Northern Illinois University
English, go, python, ruby