About

I'm a software engineer at Haselwood Group, where I design and build our Model Context Protocol (MCP) architecture in Python with fastmcp. It serves self-hosted AI assistants running on Ollama. Connecting a model to data is the easy part. The harder engineering problem is deciding what the model should never see, so I design connector boundaries over our data pipelines and APIs that let internal workflows be automated while sensitive customer and financial data stays out of reach. We're a small team, so I also own our web applications, APIs, data pipelines, and infrastructure end to end.

Before that, I spent five years at Amazon Music on the Music Royalties and FinTech teams, where I was promoted from SDE I to SDE II. I built Apache Spark pipelines on AWS EMR that calculated royalties and fed accounting and vendor reporting, along with the APIs, ledger, and disbursement systems that paid labels and publishers.

My path into engineering wasn't the typical one. I studied German and History, worked as a German-language catalog specialist for Prime Video, and moved into software through Amazon's Technical Academy. That route taught me to learn quickly and to stay close to the people who actually use what I build, whether that's accountants, music partners, or the business users relying on our assistants today.

Get in touch

The best way to reach me is email: zach@zachross.io. You can also find me on GitHub and LinkedIn, or download my resume (PDF).