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, human behavior, and engineering—and they all converge at Machine Learning Engineering. When I'm not in that world, I'm usually running or curating a new music playlist.
Current
As a member of our GTM team at Vercel, my main focus is connecting engineering leaders to our team. Every day I'm in conversations with new and tenured engineers on how we support orgs of all sizes from pre-seed to Fortune 100.
I'm building beyond my role. I designed and deployed GTM IQ, an internal contextual intelligence tool, and I'm actively contributing to our GTM agents.
Building
2020-present
Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of a recording studio in Rockville, MD. I built the business strategy (GTM, memberships, events) and tech infra (booking system, payment flows, marketing system) from scratch. 900+ customers with a 97% membership renewal rate. I also established partnerships with Montgomery County Public Schools, Omega Recording Studios, and the Baltimore Ravens.
Previous
2024-2025
2023-2024
AI Prompt Engineer working on what became the AI search results powered by Google Gemini. I was part of the RLHF training pipeline—designing prompts for multimodal models, evaluating outputs, and performing data quality assessments across Search, Maps, YouTube, and Flights. I got hands-on experience in how these systems actually learn, from the inside of the process that produces them.
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 improve their digital presence. We built and improved websites and designed high converting funnels to send traffic to. I mostly ran 4-5 figure digital marketing campaigns on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. My team consisted of two full-time photo/videographers, one JS developer, and one audio engineer.
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. At the same time, I was producing beats with friends and learning to code by customizing Myspace and Tumblr themes—two tracks that never really separated.