One senior engineer,
accountable end to end.
Zak Data Solutions is the practice of Zachary Kysar — a service-disabled veteran and senior data engineer. The person you hire is the person who scopes the work, owns the outcome, and signs the deliverable. No prime-and-sub chain, no handoff to a junior team, no overhead markup.
Background
The arc runs Army → finance → builder. Five years in the U.S. Army 82nd Airborne Division — Ranger Recon, two Iraq tours, advanced from sniper to reconnaissance team lead and promoted rapidly to Sergeant. An M.B.A. in Corporate Finance from Babson in 2012, then five years in corporate development and M&A at a major U.S. financial markets infrastructure operator. A lateral to product-and-build work in 2018 at the same company, alongside an M.S. in Computer Science (Data Analytics) at Boston University Metropolitan College — earned at night, finished in 2021.
Nine-plus years directing product and development teams across enterprise financial systems. Co-architected seven products ($15M+ annual revenue), owned incident response and high-severity external communications, built production-mirror observability tooling in SQL, Java, and Python, and contributed to internal AI work — prediction models and client-service agents — before the current LLM era. Engagements ship working software and data systems, not slide decks.
The practice spans practical data and software engineering — database upgrades, migrations, ETL, dashboards, application modernization — through to applied AI and machine-learning architecture for the clients who want it.
What I do
Education
- M.S., Computer Science (Data Analytics) — Boston University Metropolitan College, 2021
- M.B.A., Corporate Finance — Babson College, F.W. Olin Graduate School of Business, 2012
A veteran-owned small business, built by an Iraq combat veteran.
Zachary served five years in the U.S. Army 82nd Airborne Division as Ranger Recon, with two Iraq tours. The Ranger discipline carries over to civilian work: missions get completed, engagements get closed out, and the work does not get left unfinished.
Zak Data Solutions is a Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business, active in SAM.gov since 2014, with prior federal contract performance. That makes it eligible for SDVOSB set-asides and sole-source awards up to $5M in services, plus the VA Veterans First preference. For the full registration data, see For Government.
Work with me
The next step is a short conversation about the actual problem and whether I am the right person to solve it.
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