Software engineer — eight years of work that is still running.
JeffreyZalischi
I design and build production software the way engineers draft load-bearing structures: measured twice, documented, and reliable under stress. Eight years across backend systems, web platforms, and the infrastructure that keeps them honest.
First, hello
I treat production like a promise.
Every project on this page has one engineer behind it. Systems drawn to spec, built to last. I like the quiet parts of the craft — the naming, the tests, the docs — because they're what still matters a year after launch.
- years shipping to production
- 0
- systems built & still running
- 0
- working days to hear back from me
- <0
What I do
Backend & distributed systems
APIs, queues, and data pipelines designed for failure first — idempotent, observable, and documented.
Web platforms
Fast, accessible interfaces on modern frameworks, with performance budgets treated as hard limits.
Infrastructure & delivery
CI/CD, edge deployment, and infrastructure as code. If it isn't reproducible, it isn't finished.
Technical leadership
Design reviews, mentoring, and the unglamorous writing that keeps a team aligned.
Selected work
Built, shipped, still standing.
2025
Go · PostgreSQL · Kafka · Kubernetes
Ledgerline
Real-time payment reconciliation engine
A payments team reconciled thirty thousand daily transactions with spreadsheets and hope. Discrepancies surfaced days late, after money had already moved.
What changed — Reconciliation lag cut from 3 days to 40 seconds; zero unexplained variances in the first year.
2024
TypeScript · React Native · SQLite · CRDTs
Fieldnote
Offline-first inspection app for civil crews
Bridge inspectors filled out paper forms in places with no signal, then re-typed them at the office. Records went missing between the field and the filing cabinet.
What changed — 1,200 inspectors migrated; data entry time halved and no lost reports since launch.
2024
Cloudflare Workers · Astro · R2 · KV
Coldstart
Edge rendering platform for a news publisher
A publisher's pages took four seconds to load during traffic spikes — exactly when readers arrived. Caching was manual and frequently wrong.
What changed — p95 load time down to 600 ms worldwide; infrastructure cost reduced 38%.
2023
Rust · etcd · gRPC · Terraform
Quorum
Consensus-backed feature flag service
Feature flags lived in five config files across three repos. A stale flag once shipped an unfinished checkout flow to every user for six hours.
What changed — Single audited control plane; flag changes propagate in under a second with full rollback history.
2022
Python · k6 · Grafana · GitHub Actions
Gauge
Load-testing harness with budget enforcement
Performance regressions were caught by customers, not CI. Every release was a bet that nothing had gotten slower.
What changed — Perf budgets enforced on every merge; regression escapes dropped to zero over 14 months.
2021
Elasticsearch · OCR pipeline · S3 · FastAPI
Archive/RT
Searchable archive for 40M scanned records
A records office held forty million scanned documents that could only be found by knowing which box they were in.
What changed — Full-text search across the corpus in under 200 ms; retrieval requests that took weeks now take minutes.
Where I've been
Eight years, five chapters.
2023 — present
Senior Software Engineer, Meridian Systems
Own the payments platform; led the reconciliation rebuild and a team of four.
2021 — 2023
Software Engineer II, Northfield Labs
Built field-data infrastructure for civil engineering clients; shipped Fieldnote.
2019 — 2021
Software Engineer, Halbrook Media
Moved a national publisher to edge rendering; introduced performance budgets to CI.
2018 — 2019
Logistics APIs and the internal tooling nobody else wanted to fix. Learned to love tests.
2017
Engineering Intern, Civic Data Project
First production deploy. First production incident. First postmortem.