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Zach Sykes

Denver, COzsykes21@gmail.comlinkedin.com/in/zach-sykesgithub.com/Calathea-Z

Professional summary

Senior software engineer with 3+ years building and supporting production applications across React, TypeScript, C#/.NET, APIs, and relational databases. Own production reliability, incident response, and root-cause debugging alongside end-to-end delivery. Build agentic applications and Model Context Protocol (MCP) integrations, with hands-on experience using Cursor, Codex, and GitHub Copilot.

Core competencies

Production engineering: Root-cause debugging, incident response, observability, monitoring, automated testing

AI and agent tooling: Cursor, Codex, GitHub Copilot, Anthropic API, structured tool calling, MCP

Backend and data: C#/.NET, ASP.NET Core, REST APIs, EF Core, PostgreSQL, SQL Server; Node.js (projects)

Frontend: React, TypeScript, JavaScript, Tailwind CSS, accessible UX, Next.js (projects)

Systems and delivery: Azure Functions, Service Bus, WebSockets, SignalR, Docker, GitHub Actions, Azure Pipelines

Observability: Grafana, Application Insights; traceability and reliability across asynchronous workflows

Professional experience

Senior Software Engineer | Forvis Mazars · Remote

09/2026 – Present

Promoted from Full Stack Software Engineer, 06/2023 – 09/2026

  • Own production quality and reliability for critical applications, including incident response, root-cause debugging, monitoring, error reduction, and long-term stability improvements across distributed workflows.
  • Lead end-to-end delivery of React, TypeScript, and .NET applications, owning requirements and architecture through implementation, deployment, and production support.
  • Build event-driven integrations across business systems, REST APIs, Azure services, messaging infrastructure, and relational data stores, emphasizing traceability and resilient asynchronous processing.
  • Drove the transition from Blazor frontends to React and TypeScript, establishing reusable component and API integration patterns adopted across multiple teams and improving maintainability and delivery consistency.
  • Support CI/CD and production observability with GitHub Actions, Azure Pipelines, Grafana, and Application Insights to enable rapid releases and effective production troubleshooting.
  • Independently architected and shipped a real-time Planning Poker platform with WebSocket/SignalR infrastructure and backend services; adopted across software teams as a reusable internal tool.
  • Mentor junior engineers on architecture, code quality, debugging, and engineering practices; contribute to team-wide technical standards.

Selected projects

Agentic Portfolio Assistant & MCP Server

Next.js · ASP.NET Core · Anthropic API · Node.js · MCP

  • Built an agentic assistant with a Next.js interface and ASP.NET Core streaming backend using Anthropic’s Messages API and seven structured resume tools; added deterministic chat evals that exercise the live streaming endpoint and score tool-call and output criteria.
  • Built a Node.js/TypeScript stdio MCP server exposing the same seven structured resume tools to Claude Desktop and other MCP clients; added schema-parity tests to keep MCP contracts aligned with the .NET API.

Education

Software Engineering Bootcamp — General Assembly