# Zach Lowen

> Senior Software Engineer at Education First

Location: Melrose, Massachusetts, United States
Profile: https://flows.cv/zachlowen

Senior Software Engineer working on internal flight booking, allocation, and inventory systems. I enjoy digging into complex, business-critical problems and staying hands-on through design, implementation, and delivery.

I’m at my best in the trenches with my teammates when we are breaking down ambiguous problems, working through tradeoffs, and building practical solutions together. My experience spans full-stack development, domain modeling, backend architecture, and leading delivery for projects that need to balance modernization with reliability at scale. With a more recent focus on backend work.

I’m especially interested in work that improves system clarity, automation, and data flow, where better engineering directly impacts customer experience, operational efficiency, and cost.

## Work Experience
### Senior Software Engineer @ EF Education First
Jan 2023 – Jan 2025 | Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Air Team - Delivery lead engineer for internal flight booking and inventory systems supporting 300k+ annual flights.

▪️ Partnered with product to define milestones, break down work, and coordinate engineers across three global offices to ensure on-time delivery of business-critical systems.

▪️ Led implementation of a new Tour Order domain model within a greenfield modular architecture (.NET, MongoDB), breaking apart a rigid legacy model while maintaining 99.99% backward compatibility.

▪️ Led work to integrate directly with Global Distribution Systems (GDS) to automate flight updates and maintain real-time inventory accuracy; used AI-assisted tooling to accelerate development of large-scale data mappings.

▪️ Took over ownership and redirected the rebuild of EF’s internal flight allocation and booking management website, simplifying the stack by replacing seven microservices with a unified backend abstraction and reducing infrastructure cost and complexity.

### Software Engineer @ EF Education First
Jan 2019 – Jan 2023 | Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Air Team - Full-stack engineer building flight booking and inventory systems.
   
▪️ Built full-stack features and internal tools using React/TypeScript, .NET, SQL Server, MongoDB, and AWS, while maintaining and stabilizing legacy VB/C# systems.

▪️ Led the Flight Matching project, extending EF’s automated booking system to place late-enrolling travelers on their group’s existing flights, improving customer experience and reducing ticket costs through smarter automation.

▪️ Implemented a high-throughput background service to replace an unstable third-party integration, cutting processing time from 1.29s to 0.09s and eliminating recurring outages during peak season.

### Software Developer Co-op @ EF Education First
Jan 2018 – Jan 2018 | Boston, Massachusetts, United States

### Application Development Co-op @ Arrowstreet Capital, L.P.
Jan 2017 – Jan 2017 | Greater Boston Area

### Kayaking Counselor @ Camp Moosilauke
Jan 2013 – Jan 2016 | Orford, NH

### Data Engineering Co-Op @ Placester, Inc.
Jan 2016 – Jan 2016 | Boston, MA

### Fundamentals of Computer Science Tutor @ Northeastern University
Jan 2015 – Jan 2015 | Boston, MA


## Education
### Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in Computer Science
Northeastern University
Jan 2014 – Jan 2019


## Contact & Social
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/zach-lowen

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Source: https://flows.cv/zachlowen
JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/zachlowen/resume.json
Last updated: 2026-03-23