Daniela Zapata

Invest and self clearing platforms

• Led strategic reorganization of engineering division by consolidating three specialized squads into a high-performing unified team, resulting in improved collaboration and faster delivery cycles. Established multi-level management structure, successfully coaching a tech lead in people management while maintaining technical excellence
• Demonstrated exceptional talent development capabilities by elevating two underperforming senior engineers to exceed expectations within six months through targeted mentoring, clear performance frameworks, and strategic project allocation
• Set strategic alignment through regular executive partnerships, collaborating directly with CTO to ensure team initiatives supported company-wide objectives
• Spearheaded agile transformation through Basecamp ShapeUp methodology, strategically allocating 20% of sprint capacity to technical debt reduction while accelerating deployment frequency from weekly to daily releases. Orchestrated six-week delivery cycles with dedicated cooldown periods, enabling teams to tackle high-impact refactoring projects and reduce legacy code complexity. This approach reduced production incidents, while decreasing mean time to recovery by 20% through implementation of comprehensive runbooks and clear service ownership protocols

Invest and self clearing platforms

• Designed career ladders and growth frameworks for IC and management tracks, resulting in 80% of of my direct reports advancing in level or scope within 18 months
• Conducted weekly 1:1s and quarterly performance reviews for 8 direct reports
• Architected and led development of self-clearing platform, reducing operational costs by 60%
• Managed strategic transition from third-party clearing partner while maintaining system stability
• Scaled my engineering team by 650% while maintaining high performance standards and pairing engineers for growth
• Founded and led company's first engineering internship program, achieving 70% conversion rate from intern to full-time hires

Broker platform

• Led technical architecture and implementation of critical investment platform components spanning one monolithic application and four microservices, processing $100M+ in daily transactions, while emerging as a strategic team leader
• Onboarded and mentored 5 engineers in 4 months, reducing ramp-up time by 40%
• Created comprehensive technical documentation and architecture decision records
• Led technical design reviews and established code review standards
• Built ACAT transfer system supporting both inbound and outbound asset movements
• Upgraded the ACH transfer pipeline, increasing transfer success rate by 25%

As a data scientist, I led the wind turbine ML/AI team, creating models and automating processes that could be repeatable by offshore consultants

Built a training and scoring platform to allow data scientists to deploy their models to production

• Bootstrapped new PlatformX from scratch, serving client data within a year
• Owned 10+ micro-services in a multi-tenant environment forming a streaming ecosystem to score 3 types of models: Failure Engine, Anomaly Detection, Outlier using PFA/Hadrian runner and in house Python runner
• Implemented model manager, self-service model deployment platform for model owners, designing 15+ database entities
• Led agile ceremonies such as standup and retro, documented meetings, created and managed action items
• Supported whole ecosystem, troubleshooting, fixing and being on call during emergency rotations
• Demoed team accomplishments to stakeholders and drove product roadmap quarterly

Implemented and deployed an anomaly detection machine learning algorithm based on dimensionality reduction, PCA and autoencoders, in tight collaboration with data scientists

• Implemented Machine Learning Anomaly Detection PCA algorithm in Scala and Spark
• Led a team of 5 engineers and constructed the product roadmap in collaboration with other stakeholders
• Conducted all agile ceremonies and represented the team in sprint demos
• Owned training of Spark Outlier models, experimented with Spark testing libraries, spiked and implemented the solution as the sole developer
• Spearheaded the engineering intern hiring process in collaboration with HR, mentored and ramped up 2 interns that became full time employees

I built custom solutions for different clients. The most relevant were: St Judes donation platform, NBCUniversal SNL 20 year app, Government of Alberta search clusters, Wells Fargo Search implementation

Worked with remote, global core engineering team as part of Professional Services to develop features for new portal version, as well as client customizations

• Portal and Portlet development for clients and Liferay Core FOSS. Specialized in SOLR search enhancements. Major clients include: Nintendo of America, Aon Hewitt, VMware
• Implemented import/export framework for staging infrastructure
• Upgraded SOLR and Lucene integrations for new architecture and implemented new spell check/query suggest feature