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Ryan Detzel.

Product Engineer · AI Agents, MCP & Developer Tools · 20+ Years

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

Product engineer with 20+ years building production systems at startups and at scale. At Zapier, I build MCP servers, reusable agent skills, and async and cloud agents. I lead security, privacy, and governance for internal agents. I take unclear problems from discovery to production. I focus on useful software, clear UX, and measurable results.

Experience

Senior Software Engineer (Software Factory)

Zapier, Remote

Mar 2026 - Present

  • Build and ship MCP servers, reusable agent skills, and async and cloud agents on Zapier's internal AI development team.
  • Lead security, privacy, and governance for internal agents. Define sandboxing, permissions, and secret access so teams know 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

Agent engineering
MCP (Model Context Protocol), reusable agent skills, async and cloud agents
Agent security
Sandboxing, permissions, secret access, privacy, governance
AI development
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