Mackenzie Zastrow - Resume

Mackenzie Zastrow

Software engineer with a track record of building developer-facing products and eliminating inefficiencies through tooling and process. Currently leading development of the Strands Agents SDK, a framework for building AI agents in Python and TypeScript. Strong in frontend web technologies (HTML, JS/TS, React) and AWS cloud technologies.

Work Experience

  1. Amazon Web Services Remote / New York, NY 2020 – present

    1. Senior Software Engineer 2024 – present

      • Leading development for the Strands Agents SDK, a model-driven framework for building AI agents in just a few lines of code; drove technical direction and feature design across Python and TypeScript implementations
      • Optimized the developer experience for team-internal GitHub agents, reducing friction and making AI-assisted development workflows more practical to use day-to-day

    2. Software Development Engineer II 2022 – 2024

      • Independently designed and developed internal tooling to streamline diagnosis of operational issues, reducing the time to root-cause customer affecting problems
      • Organized and led cross-team initiative to deliver the frontend for SSO integration to enable enterprise customers to configure users and teams for Amazon CodeCatalyst

    3. Frontend Engineer II 2020 – 2022

      • Partnered with PM and UX to design and ship the third-party repository integration experience from prototype to production, enabling CodeCatalyst users to connect GitHub, Bitbucket, and other source providers
      • Developed team processes to cut through operational noise, enabling faster triage of real customer issues and keeping the team focused on feature delivery

  2. Cognex Corporation West Allis, WI 2012 – 2020

    1. Principal Software Engineer 2020 – 2020

      • Designed and implemented test automation framework that uses remote-code-execution technique to facilitate test development and improve product stability

    2. Associate / Senior Software Engineer 2012 – 2020

      • Developed customer-facing front-end to company's next-gen deep-learning engine on smart cameras, enabling customers to solve difficult problems for traditional machine vision
      • Built diagnostics tooling to extract relevant logs and metadata, and led escalation team to deliver solutions to high-priority bugs encountered in the field
      • Introduced MVVM architecture and drove adoption of coding guidelines, code-review process, and artifact packaging to improve testability and reduce coupling

Open Source & Hobbies

  • StackOverflow

    Top 5% in reputation site-wide and in C#; over total 80 answers, with a focus on C#, Visual Studio, WPF, and a dabbling in PHP/JavaScript

  • NUnit.ApplicationDomain

    GitHub C#/.NET

    Enables NUnit tests to execute independently in their own Application Domain; over 11 releases and 20+ resolved issues

  • GUAPR

    GitHub C#/.NET/WPF

    Warm-Reload for WPF applications allowing faster development by automatically reloading the control being programmed

  • Friendly Engine

    GitHub TypeScript/HTML/CSS

    WYSIWYG Page/Control Designer inspired by Windows Forms Designer allowing pages to be designed in a straightforward manner