Engineering Leadership & Innovation

Welcome!

I’m Rich Zapata, an experienced engineering leader with a passion for building scalable fintech solutions and elegant software architectures. With over seven years leading engineering teams and a strong foundation in Ruby on Rails development, I focus on creating robust, production-ready applications that solve real-world (and my) problems.

About Me (Personally)

I was once asked in an interview, “What gets you up in the morning?” My answer, “my kids”. I mean that both figuratively and literally. I am father of two amazing boys who keep life very interesting. I also love all things baseball (both boys play), gaming and gaming theory, cooking, and as any developer would tell you (and as you can see below), building apps. 😊

About Me (Professionally)

I spent seven years at IOU Financial, starting as a Manager in 2018 and finishing as the head of Engineering and Technology. During that time I grew the engineering organization from 4 engineers to a peak of 28, and led initiatives in:

  • Full-stack web application development (Ruby on Rails, React)
  • Financial technology and our home-grown lending platform
  • Team building and mentorship across distributed teams
  • Cloud infrastructure and DevOps (AWS)
  • API design and microservices architecture

These days I run my own consulting practice, Core Data LLC, and the most interesting thing I do is not any single app: it’s how they get built. Together with my client’s engineering lead, I co-architected a governed AI development system on Claude Code. Every project runs with a modular rules library the agents read before acting, specialized review agents covering QA, security, integration, and adversarial testing, and a git hook that blocks any push carrying a critical finding. The loop even runs across company boundaries: my client’s reviewing agent raises objections on my pull requests, and the resulting corrections are documented in the repository. Working this way, I built and shipped six applications solo over five months in 2026 (four of them are below) while client delivery continued. I’m exploring new opportunities in engineering leadership, ideally somewhere that wants this kind of AI discipline built in from day one.

Here are some of the projects I’ve been independently working on since leaving IOU Financial. Browse the navigation to explore them in more detail.

  • Fear, Faith, and the Forest - During this unemployment journey, I’ve found a lot of bad energy, negativity and hopelessness. I decided to put some of my positive energy into a Podcast which guides professionals through unemployment with positivity, hope and faith.
  • Transiet - A very simple and straightforward web analytics site for indie devs and small site owners. Built with Rails 8.1, Hotwire, and a privacy-by-architecture approach. It’s simple, bare-bones traffic data analysis for $3/month. Live at transiet.com.
  • Timezappy - Time tracking and automated invoicing for independent consultants. Log hours, set up per-client billing schedules, and let the system generate and deliver professional PDF invoices automatically. Built with Rails 8.1, Hotwire, Prawn for PDFs, and Solid Queue for the invoicing pipeline. Live at timezappy.com.
  • Marksmith - A native macOS markdown editor built in Swift and SwiftUI. Plain .md files, no vault, no proprietary database. Open a file or a folder, edit with syntax highlighting, preview rendered GFM, save in place. Sandboxed and offline-only. $2.99 one-time on the Mac App Store with no subscription and lifetime updates.
  • Amortizy - Ruby gem for loan amortization calculations. One of the challenges we faced at IOU Financial is that the amortization engine was not flexible, and implementing the features the business was asking for required a pretty hefty lift (which never reached a top priority). I developed a feature-rich amortization engine from the ground up, and released it as a Ruby gem, that could fill that gap for any SMB lender today.
  • ZapataZone - A photo archive sharing a decade of Atlanta photography with family and friends: open to browse, invitation-only to participate. Tens of thousands of images on a decoupled Rails 8.1 API and React 19 TypeScript SPA, with PostgreSQL, Cloudflare R2 object storage behind a CDN, and background processing via Solid Queue. The most architecturally complete thing I’ve built solo.

TKTrakker is an earlier build, a Discord team-kill tracker from my gaming days; its page is still in the navigation for the curious.

Each project demonstrates different aspects of modern software development, from SaaS architecture and payment processing to open-source libraries and real-time systems. The podcast represents my commitment to helping others navigate career transitions with strategy and faith.

Technical Expertise

AI Tools: Claude Code, Claude.ai, ChatGPT / GPT-4, OpenAI Codex, Google Gemini, MCP server orchestration, Anthropic API
Languages & Frameworks: Ruby on Rails, Node.js, TypeScript, React, JavaScript, SQL, Python
Infrastructure: AWS, GCP, Heroku, PostgreSQL, Redis, Docker, Terraform, CI/CD (GitHub Actions)
Specialties: Fintech, AI-Assisted Development, API Design, Team Leadership, System Architecture

Currently based in Atlanta, Georgia. Go Braves!

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