Resume

Ricardo Zavala

Staff Software Engineer

Tulsa, OK · Remote US

Staff-level full-stack engineer with 10 years owning systems end to end across React, TypeScript, Node.js, Python, Go, PostgreSQL, AWS, and distributed architectures. I work best where product decisions, backend correctness, and production reliability all meet.

Experience

Co-Founding Backend Engineer

Arkra

May 2025 - Present

  • Architecting full-stack services for an AI-powered fintech marketplace using TypeScript, Node.js, Python, PostgreSQL, and React.
  • Designing event-driven transaction flows with partitioned messaging and idempotency for retries and reordering.
  • Building AI-assisted matching and underwriting pipelines with RAG, vector search, human review, guardrails, and evaluation harnesses.

Senior Full Stack Engineer

Avenue Code

April 2025 - December 2025

  • Led a secure multi-tenant data platform across React, TypeScript, FastAPI, and PostgreSQL.
  • Built RBAC, immutable audit trails, FIPS-validated cryptography, and tenant isolation for regulated workflows.
  • Increased ingestion throughput by 40% with async services, distributed task queues, and partitioned streaming.

Senior Full Stack Engineer

Accenture Federal Services

April 2022 - April 2025

  • Architected AWS services supporting 3M+ daily transactions at sub-50ms p99 latency across peak traffic.
  • Owned GraphQL and REST API design across 14 services and standardized React and TypeScript UI patterns across 22 teams.
  • Engineered PCI-compliant payment integrations with PayPal, Stripe, Square, and Fiserv.

Full Stack Engineer

Cigna

February 2022 - April 2022

  • Built shared React and Material UI systems inside a HIPAA-regulated healthcare environment.
  • Improved provider search performance with React Query and Elasticsearch and added New Relic observability for React and Django services.

Web and Native Mobile Developer

Zappos Family of Companies

October 2018 - August 2021

  • Worked on consumer payment surfaces serving 18.5M+ monthly transactions with 99.99% uptime through peak events.
  • Designed a GraphQL federation layer that consolidated 12 legacy REST APIs and reduced frontend over-fetching by 76%.

Core stack

React, Next.js, TypeScript, Node.js, Python, FastAPI, Django, Go, REST, GraphQL, gRPC, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, Elasticsearch, pgvector, Kafka, AWS, Azure, Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes, GitHub Actions, CI/CD, New Relic, Datadog, Jest, Cypress, Playwright, PyTest.

Focus areas

Distributed systems, event-driven architecture, payments, regulated data platforms, multi-tenant systems, AI-assisted workflows, RAG, human-in-the-loop systems, observability, API design, frontend platforms, and developer tooling.

Education

Bachelor of Science, Computer Science · University of Nevada, Las Vegas · 2018 · cum laude