Zack Downing

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Experience

Competitive Sailing Sabbatical & Performance Engineering

October 2024 - July 2025
• Competed at elite international level across multiple training camps and four international regattas, culminating in a top-50 finish at the World Championship
• Achieved 47th place out of 140 competitors at the 2025 International Moth World Championship (Malcesine, ITA), ranking as one of the top amateur sailors globally
• Orchestrated comprehensive campaign logistics including multi-country travel coordination, customs/import-export compliance, and six-figure budget management
• Executed advanced composite engineering: carbon fiber laminate repairs, structural reinforcement design, custom hardware fabrication, and precision splicing of high-modulus Dyneema/Spectra cordage
• Architected and deployed end-to-end Python data science pipeline processing telemetry from Vakaros GPS/IMU sensors, implementing ML-based optimization algorithms that improved Velocity Made Good (VMG) by ~8% through systematic A/B testing of setup configurations
• Integrated computer vision models (OpenCV, YOLO) for real-time sail shape analysis, correlating visual data with performance metrics to optimize aerodynamic efficiency
• Led cross-functional training squad of 8+ athletes, designing evidence-based drill progressions and conducting comprehensive video analysis and data-driven performance debriefs to accelerate collective skill development

Backend Engineering Lead

Farther Finance | Remote | July 2020 - October 2024
• Founding backend engineer who architected and scaled core infrastructure from zero to supporting $4B+ in assets under management, serving 100+ advisors and thousands of clients across product, growth, and proprietary investment technology verticals
• Designed and implemented distributed microservices architecture using Scala, leveraging functional programming paradigms and reactive streams to ensure type-safe, fault-tolerant systems capable of handling high-throughput financial transactions
• Engineered real-time data processing pipelines using AWS Lambda, Glue, and Kinesis, implementing event-driven architectures that reduced latency by 70% and improved system observability through comprehensive instrumentation
• Led architecture design for proprietary investment technology platform, incorporating quantitative analysis tools, backtesting frameworks, and automated rebalancing algorithms that directly contributed to AUM growth
• Drove technical strategy during pivotal product-market fit discovery phase, rapidly prototyping and iterating on backend systems to support multiple product pivots while maintaining zero-downtime deployments
• Established engineering best practices including comprehensive test coverage (>85%), CI/CD automation with GitHub Actions and AWS CodePipeline, infrastructure-as-code with Terraform, and detailed API documentation
• Built and mentored high-performing engineering team through hypergrowth phase, conducting technical interviews, designing onboarding programs, and fostering culture of code review excellence and continuous learning
• Collaborated cross-functionally with product managers, data scientists, and investment strategists to translate complex financial requirements into scalable technical solutions

Software Engineering Intern | Advanced R&D, Next-Generation 5G Systems

Qualcomm | San Diego, CA | June 2016 - August 2016
• Conducted rigorous bit-level numerical analysis and optimization of SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data) firmware arithmetic operations for next-generation 5G wireless communication systems
• Implemented high-performance data structures and algorithms in C for resource-constrained embedded environments, achieving measurable improvements in signal processing throughput and power efficiency
• Collaborated with senior architects and principal engineers in Qualcomm's elite R&D division to enhance real-time signal processing efficiency for 5G baseband processors
• Delivered technical presentations to executive leadership, providing actionable insights on firmware optimization strategies that influenced future product roadmap decisions for 5G modem deployments

Education

Master of Science in Computer Science

University of Southern California | Los Angeles, CA | August 2019

Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics with Distinction

Occidental College | Los Angeles, CA | May 2017
Minors: Computer Science, Economics

Skills

Programming Languages:
• Expert: Scala, Python, Java, Go, MATLAB, SQL
• Proficient: Haskell, C/C++, Javascript/Typescript, R
• Familiar: Rust, Julia, Kotlin

AI/ML & Data Science:
• Deep Learning Frameworks: PyTorch, TensorFlow, JAX, Keras
• ML Libraries: scikit-learn, XGBoost, LightGBM, CatBoost
• NLP: Transformers, HuggingFace, spaCy, BERT/GPT fine-tuning, RAG architectures
• Computer Vision: OpenCV, YOLO, semantic segmentation, object detection
• MLOps: MLflow, Weights & Biases, model versioning, A/B testing frameworks
• Data Processing: Pandas, NumPy, Polars, Apache Spark, Dask
• Vector Databases: Pinecone, Weaviate, FAISS, Chroma
• LLM Engineering: Prompt engineering, fine-tuning, RLHF, LangChain, LlamaIndex

Software Engineering & Architecture:
• Distributed Systems, Microservices Architecture, Event-Driven Design
• API Design (REST, GraphQL, gRPC), Service Mesh (Istio)
• Functional Programming, Type Theory, Category Theory
• Real-time Data Processing, Stream Processing (Kafka, Kinesis)
• Performance Optimization, Profiling, System Design at Scale

Cloud & Infrastructure:
• AWS: EC2, ECS, EKS, Lambda, SageMaker, Bedrock, Glue, EMR, RDS, S3, CloudFormation
• GCP: Vertex AI, BigQuery, Cloud Functions
• Azure: Machine Learning, Cognitive Services
• Container Orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes, Helm
• Infrastructure as Code: Terraform, Pulumi, CloudFormation
• CI/CD: GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, CodePipeline, ArgoCD
• Monitoring: Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK Stack

Development Tools:
• Version Control: Git, GitHub, GitLab
• IDEs: VS Code, IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm, Jupyter
• Databases: PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, DynamoDB, Elasticsearch
• Message Queues: RabbitMQ, AWS SQS, Apache Kafka
• Unix/Linux, Shell Scripting (Bash, Zsh), LaTeX, Vim