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Ryan Detzel.

Product Engineer · Full-Stack + AI Agent Tooling · 20+ Years

Greater Boston Area 978-204-6975 ryan@detz.net linkedin.com/in/ryandetzel

Full-stack engineer with 20+ years building production systems across startups and at scale. Currently focused on AI-augmented development — building MCP servers, async and cloud agents, agent skills, and the security and governance tooling that lets teams deploy them safely. Strong track record of taking ambiguous, cross-organizational problems from discovery through MVP to production, with a bias for velocity, clean UX, and measurable impact.

Experience

Senior Software Engineer (Software Factory)

Zapier, Remote

Mar 2026 - Present

  • Selected for the newly formed internal AI dev team as one of the company's leading AI-forward engineers; build and ship internal AI tooling including MCP servers, agent skills, and async/cloud agents that help teams move faster.
  • Lead security, privacy, and governance for internal agents — sandboxing, scoping, and secret access — defining what agents can and cannot do.
Tech: Python, TypeScript, MCP, AI Agents, AWS, Docker

Senior Software Engineer (Revenue Zone)

Zapier, Remote

Mar 2024 - Mar 2026

  • Joined the Revenue team to scope expansion of the product catalog; selected for two tiger teams (Resellers and Workspaces) for delivery velocity and product drive, shipping internal products on small teams that grew the customer base.
  • Owned the company's entitlements system end-to-end — foundational for catalog growth and the move upmarket into Enterprise: scoped requirements across the entire organization, built the MVP, and led productionization with a small team.
Tech: Python, TypeScript, React, AWS, Docker

Engineer Lead

Nebula.io, New York, NY (Remote)

Jan 2023 - Mar 2024

  • Engineered an event-driven ETL pipeline, improving data processing speed by 90%, reducing costs by 85%, and adding superior flexibility and scalability.
  • Conceived and built a distinctive email and text messaging platform that automated client communications using NLP branching and ML-driven decision making.
  • Crafted an advanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system, transforming the company's data processing capabilities and enabling unique customer experiences.
  • Introduced a serverless architecture, yielding a 70% improvement in deliverability and 40% savings in infrastructure costs.
  • Improved team productivity by over 60% by restructuring how frontend developers run services locally.
Tech: Python, TypeScript, React, Postgres / Mongo / Elasticsearch, GCP, Kubernetes

Senior Full-Stack Engineer (Tech Lead)

Twitter, Boston, MA (Remote)

Aug 2015 - Nov 2022

  • Designed and architected internal tooling that enabled millions of new push notifications, adding ~300k new daily active users.
  • Saved over $50k/year in infrastructure costs and improved team efficiency by refactoring backend APIs, cutting deployment time by 50%.
  • Built a new signals pipeline that gave ML teams a faster feedback loop, leading to faster retraining and model-building times.
  • Created a new interviewing process to improve candidate signal, growing the team from three to twelve engineers in under eight months.
  • Led the team's Privacy & Data Protection (GDPR) initiative, reviewing all technical and product design documents within the team.
  • Increased video watch time by 25% by proposing, scoping, and building a product giving publishers insight into when their audiences were on-platform.
Tech: Scala, Python, TypeScript, React, Swift

Staff Engineer

Tapjoy, Cambridge, MA

Apr 2014 - Aug 2015

  • Migrated core ad services from Ruby to Go/Scala for reliability and response time, serving ads 30% faster.
  • Reduced Time to First Byte on web ads by 70%, increasing ad views by over 200%.
  • Built an A/B testing suite to rapidly trial new ad formats, generating tens of thousands in new ad revenue.
Tech: Ruby / Rails, Go, Scala, Python, AngularJS, AWS, MySQL

Engineer (acquired by Path)

TalkTo, Cambridge, MA

Jan 2013 - Apr 2014

  • Developed tools that increased agent productivity by 30%, leading to 50% more call completions.
  • Built an internal soundboard on Twilio letting agents interact with multiple businesses simultaneously, increasing call throughput by over 25%.
  • Developed and maintained the iOS and Android apps.
Tech: Python / Django, Java, Objective-C, AWS

Architect / VP Engineering

CustomMade Ventures

Nov 2010 - Jan 2013

  • Ran A/B tests to find the optimal price point, increasing revenue by 15% while retaining 98% of existing customers.
  • Lowered site response time by 50% through refactoring and caching.
  • Moved data-processing jobs to AWS spot instances, cutting the monthly bill by ~20%.
Tech: Python / Django, MySQL, Backbone, GCP

Principal Engineer / Director of Engineering

Chitika

Mar 2008 - Dec 2010

  • Brought the Hadoop cluster in-house, saving ~$50k/year and doubling storage capacity.
  • Designed, built, and productionized ad-serving systems targeting likely-to-click users, improving click-through rate by 60%.
Tech: Perl, Python, PHP, MongoDB, Cassandra

Technical Skills

AI / Agents
MCP (Model Context Protocol), AI agents (async & cloud), agent skills, Claude Code, RAG, prompt engineering, LLM application development
Languages
Python, TypeScript, JavaScript, Scala, Java, Go, Ruby, Swift, Objective-C
Frameworks
Django, FastAPI, Flask, React, Redux, Rails, Express, Node.js
Data
Postgres, MySQL, MongoDB, Cassandra, Redis, Elasticsearch, Hadoop
Cloud / Infra
AWS, GCP, Cloudflare (Workers, D1, R2, KV), Docker, Kubernetes, Snowflake

Education & Highlights