# Zachary Anker

> Principal Software Engineer at Stripe

Location: San Francisco, California, United States
Profile: https://flows.cv/zacharyanker

Experienced with diving into complicated situations and making sense out of madness.

## Work Experience
### Principal Software Engineer, Developer Platform @ Stripe
Jan 2018 – Present | San Francisco Bay Area
- Rebuilt reliability for the core api.stripe.com service, reducing incidents, and reducing time-to-recover from tens of minutes to seconds.
- Handled executive escalations internally and externally around scalability particularly during COVID growth.
- Designed the core semantics for Stripe's V2 API, with an aim towards improving cost to serve APIs and improving scalability.
- Split up the core monolithic codebase (20M+ LoC) into composable chunks, reducing memory usage by ~30%, boot times by ~25%, and speeding up public APIs by ~20%.

### Senior Software Engineer, Language Support @ Square
Jan 2015 – Jan 2017 | San Francisco Bay Area
- Improved developer efficiency with consistent out-of-the-box for services. Making it easier to onboard new engineers, and reducing time-to-clue when services are having issues
- Guidance and mentoring for key teams such as Capital, Payments, and Invoices on modern Ruby development practices

### Tech Lead, Merchant Onboarding @ Square
Jan 2015 – Jan 2017 | San Francisco Bay Area
Brought in to help the team with reducing their tech debt and paging volume due to Square's rapid growth into multiple countries.
- Designed/built a new identity verification and storage system, reduced tech debt and preventing one-off builds to handle each new country's quirks. Making it faster to spin up Square in new countries.
- Improved signup -> activation rate by working with Risk and Compliance teams to streamline identity verification rules, leading to an absolute 2% increase in activations.

### Senior Software Engineer, Payments Migration @ Square
Jan 2015 – Jan 2015 | San Francisco Bay Area
Temporary team formed to resolve critical scaling issues within Square's payment system. Helped to design the new payment searching system, and built out a process for seamlessly migrating call sites and data from our legacy Ruby on Rails application to a new the new system.

### Tech Lead, Seller Engagement Channels @ Square
Jan 2013 – Jan 2015 | San Francisco Bay Area
- Led efforts to consolidate multiple legacy services into a new marketing platform.
- Enabled for non-engineers to build out complex marketing companies to make it faster for Square to cross sell products to merchants. 
- Added new channels within Square's Dashboard and Register applications allowing for both marketing opportunities and reducing support outreach by preemptively notifying users of common support concerns such as banking holidays.

### Founding Software Engineer @ Placester, Inc.
Jan 2010 – Jan 2013
- Built out the entire Placester platform, including the core platform, service deployment, and visitor analytics platform.
- Enabled real estate agents to quickly import their listings into our systems, spin up their own custom branded websites, and then provide agents with analytics to see the performance of their listings.
- Helped the company achieve 20% sales growth due to allowing onboarding of 90%+ of MLS systems within the US.


## Contact & Social
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/zachary-anker-2a52b432

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Source: https://flows.cv/zacharyanker
JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/zacharyanker/resume.json
Last updated: 2026-04-12