Joel Lach — Resume

About

Director and systems architect. I build agentic AI platforms, lead multi-year platform transitions, and run engineering organizations end-to-end — from cloud through edge.

At ZaiNar I built a multi-agent development platform. Specialized agents for code generation, dependency management, automated testing, and live system monitoring, working as a coordinated team alongside engineers. We rolled it across all five engineering teams.

I extended the same platform into a PM-facing agentic sandbox. Each product manager gets their own full-stack cloud sandbox cloned from the real product. They drive Claude Code to build features against a real API and database, deploy to a personal URL, and open a PR. Same agent platform, now serving PMs the same way it serves engineers.

Three years at ZaiNar guiding the org through a sequence of platform transitions. Rebuilt the software org into five functional teams. Re-architected the cloud platform from Lambda microservices to a NestJS modular monolith on ECS. Migrated the dev model to an agentic flow. Concentrated the team to the top ~40% of builders — 30 down to 12 — by eliminating contractor positions and roles the platform had automated away. Shipped the indoor location SaaS as a 3D real-time map experience: assets, equipment, and people moving on a floor model in real time, fed by an Apache Flink event pipeline. Most of the hard work has been on real-time data behaving correctly on a 3D scene.

Earlier I led a 30+ engineer software org at HPE through a multi-year platform re-architecture that shipped as HPE Primera in 2019, and a 12-engineer firmware/infra/DevOps team at AWS that replaced the legacy out-of-band server management network across the data center fleet. Both were major platform transitions. Customers depended on them. They shipped.

I'm currently building Tokenburner, a model-agnostic AI infrastructure platform on AWS Bedrock running at zero idle cost. Hands-on in the codebase, shipping alongside the team, owning the full system end-to-end.

Independent Work

Founder — Tokenburner 2025 — Present

AI-native infrastructure and developer tooling · tokenburner.ai

A personal cloud platform on AWS — model-agnostic AI infrastructure, zero-idle-cost services, machine-readable project context. Each component runs in a private AWS account on pay-per-use primitives (Lambda, S3, DynamoDB, Bedrock).

AI chat platform with streaming responses, model switching, and conversation history
Agent infrastructure with MCP endpoint for desktop AI tools and scoped Bedrock access provisioning
S3-backed personal storage system (documents, photos, archives) with CloudFront delivery
Threaded discussion system stored as JSON — human-readable and machine-consumable context
Context file specification (tokenburner.md) ensuring AI assistants understand schema, conventions, and deployment target from first prompt
Full CDK-based deploy pipeline — base stack + product stacks sharing ALB, cluster, and DNS

Experience

Director of Software Development Jan 2023 — Present

ZaiNar · Belmont, CA

Built and led the software organization end-to-end across cloud platform, UI/backend, edge software, algorithms, and SQA. Scaled the team to 30, then concentrated to 12 top builders as the agentic platform absorbed the rest.

Built a multi-agent development platform. Specialized agents for code generation, dependency management, automated testing, and live system monitoring, working as a coordinated team alongside engineers. Rolled across all five engineering teams.
Built a PM-facing agentic sandbox platform. Each product manager gets a live full-stack cloud sandbox cloned from the real product. PMs drive Claude Code to build features against a real API and database, deploy to a personal URL with one command, and open a PR engineers review.
Concentrated the engineering team to the top ~40% of builders — 30 down to 12 — by eliminating contractor positions and roles the platform had automated away.
Three years guiding the software org through a sequence of platform transitions: rebuilt the org into five functional teams, re-architected the cloud platform from Lambda microservices to a NestJS modular monolith on ECS, migrated the dev model to an agentic flow, and shipped the indoor location SaaS as a 3D real-time map experience.
Architected and deployed a 3D real-time indoor location SaaS on AWS. Full stack from infrastructure to a 3D map UI showing assets, equipment, and people moving on a floor model. Apache Flink event pipeline, geofencing, edge tag ingestion. Most of the work was real-time data behaving correctly on a 3D scene.
Shipped the company portal in ~30 days as the platform's first production output. Diagnostic tooling, MCP integrations (Jira, Confluence, Slack, Athena), agentic infrastructure monitoring.

Director of Software Development Dec 2020 — Oct 2022

Flex Logix Technologies · Mountain View, CA

Managed three teams totaling 20 engineers — Compiler, DevOps, and Solutions Architecture — for an inference accelerator company. Hands-on across compiler infrastructure, runtime, and customer-facing tooling.

Built a model validation UI integrating with Roboflow and other vision SDK containers. Developer-facing tool for loading, running, and validating inference results on device.
Led the team that built a vision ML-Ops pipeline. Expanded model runtime support from 2 to 30 models.
Oversaw GPU cluster deployment and runtime scaling for the inference accelerator.
Developed compiler infrastructure to multiplex compile, place-and-route jobs across the toolchain; containerized for cloud deployment.

Senior Software Development Manager Aug 2019 — Dec 2020

Amazon Web Services · Cupertino, CA

Led a 12-person firmware/infra/DevOps team building the custom server management stack that replaced the legacy out-of-band console network across Amazon's entire data center fleet.

Led a 12-person firmware/infra/DevOps team that built the custom server management stack replacing the legacy out-of-band console network across Amazon's entire data center fleet.
Built microservices and Lambdas for hardware installation tracking, firmware update orchestration, and fleet health monitoring across the fleet.
Owned the security ingestion initiative defining how new server hardware enters the fleet with a verified security posture. Hands-on alongside the org leadership.

Section Manager, Software Development Aug 2017 — Aug 2019

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (3PAR) · San Jose, CA

Led a 30+ engineer software organization through a multi-year platform re-architecture culminating in the 2019 HPE Primera product launch.

Led a 30+ engineer software organization through a multi-year platform re-architecture and the 2019 HPE Primera product launch. Drove architectural decisions, delivery, and release discipline across four functionally distinct teams.
Established development process, code review standards, CI/CD pipeline, and release discipline. Set IP ownership policy and served as internal technical authority on novel implementation versus vendor-supplied components.
Final escalation point for customer-impacting issues during the HPE Primera launch.

Earlier Career

A decade of ASIC and RTL design before management. I'm not chasing silicon work today, but the hardware fluency still pulls weight — it's why I could lead compiler development at Flex Logix while engineers above and below the boundary trusted the calls. For teams building or integrating custom silicon, that lens still applies.

Section Manager, ASIC Development · Hewlett Packard Enterprise (3PAR) · Sep 2009 — Aug 2017
ASIC Design Lead · 3PAR / Hewlett Packard Enterprise · Jun 2005 — Aug 2009
ASIC Design Engineer · Mistletoe Technologies (later Gigafin Networks) · Jun 2003 — Jun 2005
ASIC Design Engineer · Aarohi Communications · Jun 2002 — Jun 2003
ASIC Design / Verification Engineer · Caspian Networks · Jun 2000 — Jun 2002
ASIC Design / Verification Engineer · iReady Corporation · Dec 1998 — Jun 2000
Engineering Intern — ASIC Tools Team · Cisco Systems · Jun 1996 — Dec 1998

Patents

Interrupt based on a last interrupt request indicator and a work acknowledgement

US10467162 · Granted Nov 2019 · Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Co-inventor with Gregory Lee Dykema and Michael T. Longenbach.

Commitment of acknowledged data in response to request to commit

US20180373653 · Application filed Jun 2017 · Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Co-inventor with Gregory Lee Dykema, Siamak Nazari, and Michael T. Longenbach.

Mechanisms for synchronizing data transfers between non-uniform memory architecture computers

US8244930 · Granted Aug 2012 · 3PAR / Hewlett-Packard

Co-inventor with Greg L. Dykema and David H. Bassett.

Packet output buffer for semantic processor

US20070019661 · Application filed Jul 2005 · Gigafin Networks

Co-inventor with Kevin Rowett, Rajesh Nair, and Caveh Jalali.

Skills

Agentic AI & Developer Workflows

Multi-agent platform PM-facing agentic sandbox MCP integrations Claude Code Tokenburner / Bedrock Vision ML-Ops

Real-Time 3D & Streaming

3D real-time map UI Apache Flink Event-driven 3D scenes Geofencing Edge-to-cloud ingest USD Mitsuba / Sionna

Platform Transitions

microservices → monolith agentic dev rollout team concentration 30→12 IPMI replacement at hyperscale HPE Primera launch

Leadership

Org building (10–30 eng) Cross-functional Hands-on architect Customer escalation

Languages

Python C/C++ TypeScript / NestJS Verilog / SystemVerilog Perl

Cloud & Infra

AWS ECS Lambda Bedrock CDK S3 / DynamoDB CloudFront

Education

Purdue University

BS Computer Engineering & BS Electrical Engineering · West Lafayette, IN · 1994–1998