Zak Knill
💡

Zak Knill

Staff Engineer // Technical Leader

📡 personal site: https://zknill.io


👾 Skills

⌨️ Engineer

Solved hard problems, not all hard problems are code problems. Deliver customer value.

Used best practices and tooling to solve our customers problems. Write code that serves as a guide and documentation for other engineers.

Built event sourced, distributed systems. Transformed java monolith into extensible event sourced platform.

👨‍💻 Technical leader

Upskilled, and empowered our engineers. Introduced best practices for architecture, code style, development approaches etc.

Created and lead a forum for our backend engineers to seek feedback and take wide ranging architecture decisions.

Communicate with stakeholders across all parts of the business. Create buy-in for difficult and valuable engineering decisions.

Managed and mentored our team members.

🧠 Experience

Attest / Staff Engineer

July 2021 - current; London and remote.

Tech Lead, Aug 2019 – Jul 2021 ∙ 2 yrs

Engineer, Jun 2016 – Aug 2019 ∙ 3 yrs 3 mos

Working across multiple cross-functional product squads. Leading, unblocking, coaching.

Developing event sourced architecture for real time consumer insight platform.

Introduced cutting edge technology to our stack; docker, linkerd (service mesh), go.

Built the first go service, migrated from 1box 1app system to ECS and then Kubernetes. Infrastructure design and engineering.

Experience with VPC, security groups, SSL provisioning, networking. Experience with many AWS services.

Multiplay / Developer

Nov 2015 - June 2016; London

Developed go and python services with REST APIs. Solved complex multi-cloud hosting and scaling problems.

Geniac / Engineer / Developer

June 2014 - Sept 2014; London

Launched PaaS webapp. Developed automatic document generation system.

🤖 Tech

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

go, git

⭐⭐⭐⭐

java, kuberentes, kafka, terraform, sql, postgres, dynamo, prometheus, linkerd, docker

⭐⭐⭐

ansible, grafana, dhcp, coredns