# Zach Childers > Senior+ Security Software Engineer | Engineering Leader | Security Engineer | Full Stack | Ex-Microsoft | Search & Rescue Location: Los Angeles Metropolitan Area, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/zachchilders Zach Childers is a highly technical Senior+ Security Software Engineer who believes that strong engineering starts with strong teams. He is experienced in building high quality software with strong security feature sets architected from first principles. Zach has shipped clients and services that scale to millions of users in almost every language you can name, and is very proud of the fact that he has deleted more code in his career than he has written. Areas of Expertise Software Engineering | Leadership | Microservices | Cloud Computing | Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) | Large Language Models (LLM)| Full Stack Dev | Continuous Integration Continuous Deployment (CICD) | Incident Management | EDR | Governance, Compliance and Risk (GRC) | CMMC | FedRamp | NIST Technical Skills and Tools Languages and Frameworks: Rust, Typescript, Go, Modern C++ Software and Tools: Azure, AWS, Kubernetes, Github Actions, WorkOS, Okta/Auth0 ## Work Experience ### Senior Software Engineer @ Hadrian Jan 2024 – Present Acquired by Hadrian ### Head of Backend and Security, Founding Engineer @ Datum Source Jan 2022 – Present Collaborated with Product Leadership and C Suite executives and built industry disrupting platform features a year before the competition by successfully leading a team of six senior engineers to accomplish key strategic initiatives for an AI-powered offensive security organization. - Engineering Leadership and Architecture Worked with Product Leadership and C Suite executives to translate a 3-month roadmap into actionable and well scoped sprints for engineers to achieve #1 spot in industry. Developed platform from 0-1 and guided through product market fit culminating in a successful acquisition Scaled platform 100x amount of demand post acquisition, allowing GMV to grow 10x within 6 months and maturing platform overnight while integrating new tech stack including Next.js and Go on Kubernetes + AWS. - Application Security Engineering Secured #1 spot in industry by implementing enterprise grade security features to build a competitive advantage for Datum Source. Architected and implemented SSO, IAM, RBAC/ABAC, and File Sharing features to create strong market differentiation Continuously assessed security to upkeep CMMC standards, allowing capture of 100s of millions of GMV. - AI Engineering Built workflow to quickly iterate from Technical Design Document to checked in code in 10% of the implementation time without workflow. Designed and implemented LLM + OCR based document parser to reduce time to input quote files from 5 minutes to ~10 seconds while maintaining 10% better accuracy over human data entry at 1/10th the cost of off the shelf products. Replaced error prone regex based email parser with LLM based parser to drive usage of email based approvals while reducing false positives to 0. - Regulatory Compliance Developed and implemented policies and procedures at platform level to maintain a high engineering velocity in compliance with stringent regulatory standards including ITAR, CMMC 2.0/NIST 800-172, FedRAMP Moderate/NIST 800-53 ### Senior Software Engineer @ Microsoft Jan 2019 – Jan 2022 | Remote Software Engineering Moved SmartScreen client out of Windows and into Chromium Edge, rewriting the whole codebase to use cross platform C++ in order to protect 275M+ users on every platform from phishing and malware on the web. Rewrote the Smartscreen client in Rust in order to reduce memory issues and bug rates by 93%+ Ported SmartScreen to a pipeline architecture where stages could be activated, allowing the same codebase to protect browser users as well as run in kernel mode deep within Windows 10/11 to protect 1.4 billion devices while holding the same high performance and reliability standards. Engineering Leadership Led a team of 5 engineers, providing technical direction to reliably ship features on a product with stakeholders across Edge, Office, and Windows orgs Set, measured, and achieved success KPIs on performance, reliability, and protection metrics. Worked with executives and products to curate a 6 month roadmap to ensure the team could execute efficiently without overloading. AI Engineering Applied transfer learning to deploy client side models in order to proactively find and report threats before they came through threat intelligence pipelines. ### Software Engineer @ Microsoft Jan 2015 – Jan 2019 | Redmond, WA Built and scaled high performance rendering framework to serve Microsoft.com, Xbox.com, and all other Microsoft web properties in milliseconds. Built intelligent caching service to serve targeted content to millions of users per day while saving terabytes of daily bandwidth and reducing latency from 5s to 10ms. Architected and implemented a modern deployment pipeline that deleted 100,000 lines of code while also increasing deployment frequency without manual intervention. ### Research Assistant @ Cogswell Polytechnical College Jan 2014 – Jan 2015 Assisted director of Software Engineering department in researching and building a real-time fluid solver using CUDA and OpenGL. ### Software Engineer @ Handspeak Jan 2014 – Jan 2014 Designed and built a prototype for gesture input system based around a motion capture glove. Technologies included OpenGL, FMOD, and proprietary CyberGlove libraries as well as the Eigen matrix library used to implement a PCA module. ## Education ### Master's degree in Cybersecurity UC Berkeley School of Information Jan 2018 – Jan 2019 ### Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in Software Engineering University of Silicon Valley Jan 2012 – Jan 2015 ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/zachilde - Website: https://www.microsoft.com --- Source: https://flows.cv/zachchilders JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/zachchilders/resume.json Last updated: 2026-03-22