# Zach Cotter

> Principal Software Engineer at Forward Financing

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

Check out some of my programming projects at www.zachcotter.com

## Work Experience
### Principal Software Engineer @ Forward Financing
Jan 2021 – Present | Boston MA

### Software Engineer @ Forward Financing
Jan 2016 – Present | Boston, MA

### Software Engineer @ America's Test Kitchen
Jan 2015 – Jan 2016
- Architected and implemented a RESTful API in Rails to serve a diverse variety of front-end products, each with a unique set of business requirements.
- Developed a back-end caching strategy and optimized performance to sustain API loads generated by over 20 million page views per month and spikes of up to 10,000 requests per minute.
- Integrated Kitchen Equipment Reviews feature with Amazon’s affiliate revenue program.
- Built front-end pages from composites provided by the Design/UX teams using React and jQuery. 
- Reduced technical debt – upgraded Rails, reduced test suite runtime from ~80 mins to ~10 mins.
- Contributed to team discussions about SDLC process, continuous integration workflows, release strategies, Agile and business tradeoffs.
- Prototyped a recommendation engine using collaborative filtering (a machine learning technique).

### Web Developer Co-op @ America's Test Kitchen
Jan 2014 – Jan 2014 | Brookline, MA
▪ Worked as a Full-Stack Ruby on Rails Developer on a network of sites with over 6 million users
▪ Integrated existing equipment review feature with Amazon’s affiliate program
▪ Improved back-end systems and worked with the PostgreSQL database
▪ Built front-end pages from the design team’s photoshop composites

### Software Engineering Co-op @ NaviNet
Jan 2013 – Jan 2013 | Boston, MA
- Designed a step based development environment provisioning framework in Python to automate what used to be a 2-4 week manual setup process.
- Created a database decompression utility in C# that was used to resolve a production incident.
- Built a Python utility that cross-referenced a list of scheduled production jobs against Splunk event log data to find unstarted or incorrectly scheduled jobs
- Developed several Java programs that used Atlassian’s Jira API.

### Assistant Manager @ Deerspring Pool
Jan 2012 – Jan 2012
- Supervised daily routines of over 80 pool employees.
- Facilitated guard training and evaluated employee performance.
- Coordinated with EMS responders during emergencies.


## Education
### BS in Computer Science and Environmental Science
Northeastern University


## Contact & Social
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/zach-cotter-95814b80

---
Source: https://flows.cv/zachcotter
JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/zachcotter/resume.json
Last updated: 2026-04-11