Portfolio

Zachary Landes

Senior Engineering Lead

I lead the delivery of complex data systems in highly regulated environments.

Over the past 8 years, I’ve led engineering for regulated, data-heavy platforms—owning architecture, delivery, and quality from design through production for climate research, healthcare, and geospatial intelligence.

Currently Senior Engineering Lead at Gridsafi, where I set technical direction for an institutional geospatial intelligence platform and hands-on delivery across data pipelines, APIs, and infrastructure.

View Selected Work Contact

About

Lead engineer with 8+ years shipping software in regulated, data-heavy fields. I specialize in turning complex requirements into clear technical designs, reliable systems, and teams that ship with confidence.

I focus on end-to-end engineering ownership—from architecture and implementation through observability and uptime. I combine hands-on backend work with leadership on code quality, reviews, and technical standards across cross-functional teams.

Core Strengths

  • Engineering leadership: Setting technical direction, raising the bar on design and reviews, and unblocking delivery without losing sight of production reality.
  • Systems & delivery: Owning critical paths across services, data pipelines, and infrastructure; keeping releases predictable in high-stakes environments.
  • Compliance & data: Deep experience in federal climate data and regulated healthcare—building platforms that meet transparency and safety expectations.
  • Cross-functional partnership: Working with stakeholders to turn mandates and constraints into concrete engineering plans the team can execute.

Featured Case Study

Global Change Information System (GCIS)

Led engineering for a federal platform supporting national climate transparency and cross-agency discovery.

The Challenge

Critical climate datasets and research artifacts were fragmented, lacking the provenance required for federal transparency standards.

What I Led

  • Directed a team of 5 engineers to build a unified metadata system linking datasets, reports, and persistent identifiers.
  • Served as the technical bridge between program stakeholders and developers to scope complex provenance-focused features.
  • Improved data accuracy by 35% while maintaining 99.5% system uptime in a regulated federal environment.
  • Led technical design and delivery for API and UI work that enabled cross-agency data discovery.

Impact

  • Established a scalable foundation for cross-agency climate integration.
  • Enabled researchers to trace data provenance across thousands of federal climate artifacts.

Bet Collector

Prediction market aggregator and analytics platform for trading data.

betcollector.io

DebtDetector

Platform for credit report analysis and debt negotiation automation.

debtdetector.io

ThereYouAre

Data visualization tool for global cost-of-living comparisons.

thereyouare.xyz

ClearBill

Transparency tool for medical pricing and billing reconciliation.

clearmybill.app

  • Senior Engineering Lead

    Gridsafi Geospatial Intelligence

    2026 – Present

    • Sets engineering direction for a geospatial intelligence platform—architecture, stack choices, and quality bars—while staying involved in design, implementation, and production issues.
    • Leads delivery from prototype toward pilot deployment across data pipelines, APIs, and cloud infrastructure, with clear ownership of reliability and performance.
    • Mentors engineers, runs technical planning and risk reviews, and removes delivery bottlenecks without sacrificing long-term maintainability.

  • Lead Developer / Engineering Lead

    U.S. Global Change Research Program

    2019 – 2025

    • Led engineering for a federal climate data platform—technical design, implementation priorities, and day-to-day delivery with a team of 5 engineers.
    • Turned complex data and provenance requirements into shipped features, APIs, and operational improvements in production.
    • Ran systems that held 99.5% uptime in a regulated, high-transparency federal environment.

  • Software Developer

    IdeaCrew

    2018 – 2019

    • Delivered enrollment features for healthcare exchange platforms used by 8,000+ monthly users.
    • Managed technical tradeoffs and implementation requirements for compliance-heavy features.
    • Participated in weekly agile releases and sprint planning in a highly regulated domain.

Currently open to lead engineer and engineering leadership roles (hands-on IC or small-team lead) in high-stakes industries—including climate, fintech, and healthcare.