Hi, I'm Zach.

I'm a U.S. Army Warrant Officer and a Field Artillery targeting technician — the technical specialist a command relies on to turn a commander's intent into precise, accountable effects under time pressure and real uncertainty. Across joint and multinational operations, my career has been one long exercise in the same discipline: translating ambiguous, high-consequence problems into structured plans, defensible decisions, and executable actions where being wrong has a cost. It left me with a durable obsession — how do you make complex, consequential decisions legible, verifiable, and worth trusting?

I don't just operate inside those systems; I work to improve them. My professional writing on closing the gap in artillery effects expertise earned the Army's CW5 John A. Robinson Eagle Writing Award, arguing for deep technical understanding over blind reliance on black-box tools — the same conviction that now drives the software I build. Most of that energy currently goes into WITAN, a personal AI system assembled from many small, local, observable models rather than one large opaque one, built to turn scattered intent into verifiable action.

That building runs alongside deliberate academic movement toward AI systems engineering. I hold a master's in management with a focus on IT project management, and I'm pursuing an M.S. in Systems Engineering at Johns Hopkins University's Whiting School of Engineering, concentrating on artificial intelligence and human–team systems — the formal grounding beneath the systems I'm already building by hand.

In parallel I coach and advise early-stage founders and high-performing professionals, helping them navigate uncertainty and build resilient operating systems as they scale. Across all of it — targeting, engineering, coaching, code — the throughline holds: turn ambiguity into structured, verifiable action, and build systems people can actually trust.