zach williams.cv

Zach Williams

Senior Principal Software Engineer
Email available on the website • Phone available on the website • github.com/jawbreaker-io • linkedin.com/in/zach-williams-4567a412
senior principal software engineer

engineering solid systems.

I am a technical leader with 18 years of experience in the enterprise data storage industry. I specialize in space reduction architectures, filesystem integrity validation, low-level data paths, and leveraging agentic workflows and spec-driven development (SDD) processes. I lead engineering squads through complex system integrations and act as a strong advocate for continuous learning.

linkedingithub
Zach Williams
career path

work experience

Senior Principal Software Engineer

Dell Technologies
Oct 2018 - Present
  • Served as Feature Lead for the space consumption reduction initiative in the PowerStore product to support Hybrid Flash Array (HFA) environments, leading a team of 12 senior engineers to achieve a ~50% consumption reduction and >30% improvement in large IO performance.
  • Acted as Technical Lead for the Namespace File System Check (fsck) component in the PowerStore platform, overseeing successful validation and serving as the primary tier-3 escalation contact.
  • Led a team of 5+ senior engineers in designing and implementing the Data at Rest Encryption (D@RE) management microservice.
  • Designed and coded validation and recovery processes for custom on-disk B+ Tree elements (Namespace Key-Value Store Realms).
  • Developed a metadata log destaging optimization that locks multiple metadata pages within a single batch, yielding a 22% reduction in write amplification and 15% write throughput gains under benchmark load testing.
  • Integrated agentic validation workflows (using Claude Code and Google Antigravity) and spec-driven testing models (Speckit and OpenSpec) into filesystem verification components, cutting regression runtimes by 40%.

Principal Software Engineer

Dell Technologies
Jul 2015 - Oct 2018
  • Joined as a founding member of the Unity enterprise storage engineering team, taking core responsibility for the System Storage Pools layout.
  • Coordinated file system integration layers for both Block and File (NAS) components and presented live system architecture demos to executive management.
  • Served as Feature Lead for the storage provisioning management of background deduplication tasks on the Unity storage product line.
  • Architected the Unity background activity coordinator to schedule deduplication session priority dynamically, which was later scaled into the system-wide Activity Resource Coordinator.

Senior Software Engineer

EMC Corporation
Jan 2009 - Jul 2015
  • Technical Lead for the CLARiiON SnapView storage copy product, managing product maintenance, release scheduling, and coordination for a team of 5 remote contractors.
  • Joined the VNX Total Customer Experience (TCE) engineering team as an initial member, handling hotfixes and direct escalation responses across block and filesystem layers.
  • Authored a checksum-based fault containment routine for the Mapped LU Slice Allocation Table on the VNX appliance, automating recovery for on-disk corruptions and eliminating data unavailability incidents.

Software Engineer II

EMC Corporation
May 2007 - Jan 2009
  • Served as Development Lead for the CLARiiON Quality of Service (QoS) software engine.
  • Integrated control path engine layers with Unisphere management panels, resolving critical data path bottlenecks across 3 VNX appliance updates.
  • Trained 8 offshore engineers and successfully transitioned QoS engine codebase ownership over a 3-month cycle.

Intern and Co-Op

EMC Corporation
Sep 2005 - May 2007
  • Interned with the MirrorView/A replication development team and tested script deployment modules for the Centera platform.
core strengths

skills & expertise

programming & systems

Modern C++CPythonJava + RxJavaMultithreadingLinux kernel debuggingFilesystem validationB+ Trees

AI & agentic workflows

Agentic workflows (Claude Code, Antigravity)Spec-Driven Dev (Speckit, OpenSpec)AI IDEs (Windsurf, OpenCode)

tools & architectures

Storage system designDeduplication systemsSystem integrationgdb & ValgrindGit + GitHubJIRA & LinearAgile (Scrum @ Scale)Linux & Windows
credentials

education

Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering

North Carolina State University

Class of 2007 | Raleigh, NC