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)

As Head of Engineering at IOU Financial, I started as Manager back in 2018, and 3 years later was promoted to VP (I list as Director, because most places will rule me out as overqualified when I say VP) During the seven years I worked there, I grew the engineering organization from 4 engineers to a height of 25+, and lead 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

I’m currently performing contract software/data engineering roles (both with the assistance of AI) and exploring new opportunities in engineering leadership while building tools and sharing knowledge with the developer community.

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.
  • ZappyNotes - Comprehensive note-taking application with subscription tiers that I created once I saw how much my Evernote subscription went up. I assumed there were others who experienced the same sticker shock and developed a much cheaper alternative that I later released as open-source in favor of other projects.
  • TKTrakker - Discord bot for gaming analytics and team tracking. I developed this way back in my gamer days, to assist our teams in tracking team kills in Discord. This go around I used Claude to aid me in pushing it to a hosting service, and add it to my Discord server. This was more of a POC for me.

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, GitHub Copilot, Anthropic API
Languages & Frameworks: Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, React, SQL, Python
Infrastructure: AWS, GCP, Heroku, PostgreSQL, Redis, Docker
Specialties: Fintech, API Design, Team Leadership, System Architecture

Currently based in Atlanta, Georgia. Go Braves!

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