Zach J
I've always been fascinated by systems—the ones people build and the ones that emerge naturally. As a kid, I'd take things apart to understand their mechanics, then put them back together. That curiosity about how things interact and work never left.
That same impulse led me down a winding path into systems thinking and engineering. It sits at this intersection of psychology, math, philosophy, and building things—all the stuff that genuinely interests me. When I'm not in that world, I'm usually running or tinkering on side projects.
Current
At Vercel helping engineering and product teams build and iterate faster. Technically I'm in sales, but really I'm just trying to understand what people are building and figure out if we can help.
Previous
2024-2025
2023-2024
RLHF Prompt Engineer working on Google Gemini, training AI models to be better at marketing and sales use cases. It gave me a much deeper understanding of how these systems actually learn.
2021-2023
Founding team member doing business development and analytics. Built the BD function from scratch and grew it to three people. I focused on generating pipeline by understanding what the data was telling us and turning that into strategy.
2018-2021
Founded this agency to help small businesses with their digital presence.
2015-2017
Managed 40+ people and opened three new stores. I learned a lot about operations and people management here.
2013-2015
As a Junior and Senior in high school, I led a team to rebuild our school's website from scratch. Got my feet wet with HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP. Earned my Adobe Dreamweaver CS6 certification and realized I genuinely loved building things for the internet.
