about.
I’m Zach. I find joy in building tools that help me through everyday life.
It usually starts from a small, repetitive task or problem I keep running into. I see if I can put together a solution that’s easy to use every day, and then I share it with people I know running into the same thing.
I’ve come to love design. It’s something that can consume me, and I look forward to learning and discovering more about my design tastes.
the day job (“client work”)
During the day, I consult to a top-5 card issuer. Remediation means finding issues across the common functions you’d think a bank would have nailed down, like APR and rewards, and the list goes on. We scope the issue, develop or validate that the data behind the population is accurate so we’re not missing anyone, and we deploy the code fix so it doesn’t happen again. We also help the customers who were harmed before the fix. We make them whole by sending them money and correcting anything that hit their credit bureau reporting.
This takes a lot of analysis, which is something I enjoy. It also takes a lot of stakeholder management: creating consensus, and making complex processes and analytical ideas accessible to people who may be less experienced with analytics but carry real domain expertise. Bringing all those people together, facilitating a productive discussion, and helping push the fix along.
Right now we’re building custom Gems in Gemini for a client. I spend a lot of my time in Google Workspace, Gemini, and Snowflake.
So far, my efforts have found issues across millions of accounts and hundreds of thousands of dollars in money owed to customers that wouldn’t have been found otherwise.
building community wherever I work
I equally enjoy being involved in the firm and building our community. I’m chief of staff to our 70-person advanced analytics group, and I run our AI training group in the New York office.
I enjoy hosting panels that help people understand what’s happening across different parts of the firm and encourage collaboration. Recently I instructed our firm’s AI crash course, upskilling people on what AI can actually do within their everyday workflows. It’s deeply satisfying to watch an epiphany form within someone who hasn’t been exposed to the powers of AI. It can be quite fun.