Zachery Moneypenny

Empathetic and diverse software development teams make software everyone can use.

Professional Experience

Cars.com Director, Enterprise Platform Software Engineering

Jan 2022 - Present
Enterprise Services Event-Sourced Architecture AWS

  • Built enterprise platform technical strategy for Cars Commerce, including vehicle inventory processing for multiple product platforms and customer data
  • Forged alignment around new cenralized services with five different business units
  • Worked in concert with Support, Sales, Product, and Operations to turn around failing services and software development process
  • Brought new observability capabilities to a variety of polyglot services running in kubernetes
  • Operationalized incident and on-call process for new enterprise services

Cars.com Senior Engineering Manager, Platform

Oct 2020 - Dec 2021
Elixir Phoenix AWS

Worked primarily to coordinate across feature teams and ship the new Cars.com platform. In turn, worked as release manager for the first test release to production, drove the prioritization and backlog for an engineering team, managed a variety of engineers and managers across other teams, coached managers on other teams on building better processes and team dynamics, wrote feature code to deliver extra functionality for critical business systems, redesigned the job descriptions and hiring/interview processes for the Software Engineering team, redesigned a core frontend metrics gathering library and rolled out the usage examples to engineers across the organization.

Cars.com Application Engineering Manager

Nov 2019 - Oct 2020
Elixir Phoenix AWS Shape-Up Team One

Advised multiple teams working in 8 week cycles on various systems and subsystems for the new Cars.com platform. Worked with engineering managers, product managers and design to determine requirements based on functionality in the existing platform, and strove to build better processes and systems on the fledgling engineering team.

Mobile Doorman VP Engineering

Jan 2019 - Nov 2019
Ruby/Rails Vue.js AWS

I managed the growth and process of the engineering team at Mobile Doorman, a leading provider for custom resident experiences in the multi-family housing industry.

I worked closely with the VP of Product to build an incredibly efficient and productive dev team that ships to production daily and with high quality. Years spent in agile teams of all kinds have left me with a great toolbox to reach into to continue to work with teams and tweak process until we find a great fit for the team and company.

I managed and architected the evolution of our Rails backend from its seed-stage origins to keep up with our current continued growth, as well as put in place additional systems to give us better data around how our platform is being used.

I work with sales, account managers, customer support and product to drive priority for engineering team across all the stakeholders given our resources.

Finally, alongside the rest of the dev team I work on new features, fixed bugs and made general improvements to the code and build process.

Roche Sequencing Solutions Principal UI Developer

Dec 2017 - Dec 2018
AngularJS Angular Webpack

Worked on the Angular frontend to the AVENIO ctDNA analysis product with a diverse technical team stretching from Javascript UI through web services to bioinformatics processing.

Built custom tooling to reduce testing complexity for the Madison development team, allowing engineers to focus on delivering feature code rather than perpetually fiddling with configuration tasks. This points to a particular personal goal I have: to clear away distractions and inconveniences on any team I'm on so everyone else can do their best work.

Facilitated bi-weekly team retrospectives as a way to bring the team closer as well as give folks a sense of what other team members were concentrating on.

Adorable.IO, LLC Principal Developer

Nov 2014 - Nov 2017
Ruby/Rails React Webpack Elixir/Phoenix Golang AngularJS

Worked with a variety of name-brand clients (such as GoPro, Getty Images and Gamut) to drive new feature and product launches. In doing so, I worked on everything from prioritization and backlog grooming, to architecture design, to implementation and testing.

On some clients, I additionally consulted on improving engineering team dynamics through feedback, process improvements and frequent team retrospectives.

I led several efforts on smaller, internal web site and application projects. For example, I designed the architecture for and built the Cardigan front-end and backend systems.

I also coordinated internal tech talks on such topics as Elixir and Phoenix.

Intuit Inc. Staff Software Engineer

Jul 2013 - Nov 2014
BackboneJS Grunt/Gulp Java Modern C++ C C#/.Net

I was a lead developer for Intuit Payroll for QuickBooks and paychecks.intuit.com.

I led a team that worked on refactoring legacy QuickBooks for Windows C/C++ code to talk to a new generation of cloud services. I improved team productivity by 90% (cutting idle time for artifact delivery), introduced unit testing to a code base that everyone said was untestable and walked the fine line between platform improvements and delivering feature code.

I led a team that built https://paychecks.intuit.com, a product for employees of small businesses using Intuit Payroll to view their pay stubs and W-2s. It was a MarionetteJS app that was an initial experiment with single-page apps hooked up to Intuit's mature Java services layer.

I'm particularly proud of the fact that I did all of this very effectively as a remote employee. The teams I worked with and led were mostly in Mountain View, CA while I worked from home or co-working spaces in Madison, WI.

Intuit Inc. Senior Software Engineer

May 2005 - Jul 2013
Modern C++ C C#/.Net

I was a primary developer on Intuit QuickBooks Payroll for Windows. For multiple releases I was in charge of maintenance, new feature development, and stewardship of the legacy C/C++ code base for payroll in QuickBooks. This work involved bootstrapping new feature development and interop using C# and C++/CLI components.

The most significant feature my team launched was for desktop users to be able to e-file payroll tax forms and e-pay payroll tax liabilities across federal plus 50 state jurisdictions. I personally wrote and maintained the payroll rules engine on the client side, as well as the dynamic UI component that handled credential entry and transmission to the TurboTax SOAP API.

Most of my time in this position (including significant releases of the e-file and e-pay feature) was as a remote employee, working from my home and other co-working spaces in Madison, WI.

Intuit Inc. Automation Engineer

Jul 2001 - May 2005
C++/COM Silk Test Perl PHP

My team built the QuickBooks automation lab, where nightly builds of QuickBooks for Windows were run through acceptance tests, smoke tests and regression tests. I designed and built the internal web application that allowed test suites to be kicked off and collated results for developers, QA engineers and managers.

I wrote automated acceptance and regression tests, as well as test-related scripts for running and reporting results on automated tests. I also worked on the COM layer of QuickBooks to enable tighter automation integration with the custom UI framework QuickBooks used.

Community

YWeb Career Academy Mock Interview Coordinator

Nov 2014 - March 2020

YWeb Career Academy is a grant- and donation-funded dev bootcamp in Madison, Wisconsin focused on providing software development opportunities to young women and people of color.

Since the first cohort of the program in 2014, I’ve been developing and running the mock interview program for YWeb. Through this program I’ve met and worked with many folks from the Madison tech community (both large companies and small) that believe this program can make our industry more diverse and inclusive.

I coordinate two events for each cohort, plus a variety of in-class activities andtalks. At the beginning of the session we do an informal Coffee Chat event where students and volunteers from local tech companies chat about the students' goals and background. At the end of each session, before graduation, we then run a full formal mock interview with another set of volunteers. These are 1-on-1 interviews in a formal setting, and prioritize feedback to the students to prepare them for coding/pairing interviews for internships.

Technical Interviewing Meetup Founder/Organizer

Apr 2017 - Jul 2019

I founded a meetup to help local developers practice their technical interviewing skills.

The meetups take a variety of forms: talks on how to approach various types of coding interviews, group participation sessions where we talk about various concepts that typically appear in interviews such as big O notation, tree-related quesionts and recursion just a session of mock interviews with other attendees. Additionaly, I write blog posts on interviewing and give talks to other local meetups specific to whatever technological niche they're focused on.

Madison Ruby/Rails Meetup Organizer

2013 - 2015

Main organizer for the listed years and co-organizer for much longer.

While an organizer, I coordinated with speakers and ran hack night events. When we didn't have speakers I would often step in and deliver lightning talk or other extemporaneous content.

UW Computer Science Alumni Club Co-Organizer

Aug 2017 - Jul 2019

I worked with the UW Foundation and the CS Department at the University of Wisconsin to plan alumni events here in Madison for ~3,000 alums in the area.

The events we planned include social events as well as tours of local tech companies.

Education

University of Wisconsin-Madison BS Computer Science

1997 - 2001