# Zane M. Saul > Senior Software Engineer · Rosemount, MN Software engineer with 7 years of experience. 5 years at Dell Technologies integrating enterprise platforms for 100,000+ users (Microsoft Teams, telephony, security governance), followed by independent work owning full-stack delivery of live payment systems, client platforms, AI agent systems, and production infrastructure managing ~50 services. Email: zane.saul@icloud.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zane-saul/ GitHub: https://github.com/ZaneMSaul X: https://x.com/Zane_M_S Site: https://zanesaul.com ## About Senior software engineer, 7 years. Five years at Dell, on systems 100,000 employees used. Then independent — I take a business problem through production and stay responsible after it ships. Available for senior engineering roles. ## Expertise What I can be trusted with. A product. Booking and checkout. The environment they run on. A company-wide problem that cannot wait. ### Complete products I sit with the owners, shape what we are building, and take it to launch. They do not have to already know how to build. I turn a business need into something they can put in front of customers. They are not coordinating a designer, a developer, and a launch person. One person carries it through the messy middle. ### Big-company scale Company-wide security response, in production in under 18 hours. At Dell I sat on conferencing and collaboration. If those systems broke, it came to me. I owned the systems and the process. When leadership had to lock down outside Teams chat during a security response, I had a working company-wide approval path in production in under 18 hours. People requested access; it went to their VP once, not a thousand times; the company could keep doing business without leaving the door open. Executives and security were happy because it shipped and it worked. I was also the security champion for a 40-person team. I drove the changes I could control and chased the ones I could not. ### Infrastructure and security I can keep a product on the air and restore it if it breaks. I can see if something is getting sick before customers do, and I can see how people actually use it. Private data stays off the public internet even when the pieces live in different places, and I keep copies so we can get it back. ### AI I can trust with private work I built AI that keeps project context in-house — no dumping work into a public chatbot, no re-explaining the project every session. Company knowledge stays inside the building. People do not start from zero every time they open a new chat. ## Experience ### Independent Software Engineer, Self-employed 02/2024 – Present · Rosemount, MN - Contracted directly with a service business to deliver a production booking platform end-to-end — Square payments, server-authoritative pricing, and time-slot holds — now processing live customer transactions. - Sole engineer for two independent clients over 1 year — owned requirements, architecture, contracts, deployment, and ongoing operations while facilitating design and weekly collaboration. - Built an AI agent platform with hybrid retrieval (graph + vector + keyword), a 14+ tool ecosystem with structured schemas, and a deterministic enforcement layer validating agent behavior against architectural constraints. - Operated a production server cluster managing ~50 containerized services with NetBird WireGuard mesh networking, resolved 200+ critical CVEs, and implemented dual-repository backups with automated restores. ### Software Engineer II, Dell Technologies 05/2019 – 02/2024 · Round Rock, TX / Remote - Managed Microsoft Teams licensing and application policies for 100,000+ users via PowerShell automation across multiple acquisitions, ensuring consistent access controls and service entitlements. - Provisioned conferencing for 50,000+ and enterprise voice for 30,000+ users across Teams and Zoom, managing complex service orchestration with overlapping entitlements. - Engineered Active Directory scanning and auto-sync automation so acquired telephony inventory integrated without manual intervention, reducing provisioning time by 25%. - Developed a Python-based meeting room implementation tracker, ingesting database inventory and Smartsheet vendor data to automate Jira status updates for 100+ meeting rooms globally, reducing manual tracking by 15 hours per week. - Built executive Power BI dashboards with automated data pipelines for daily tracking of global telephony rollout, replacing weekly manual status reports and cutting reporting cycle from 3 days to daily refresh. - Led secrets management standardization for a 40-person team as Secure Development Champion — replacing plaintext secrets with encryption certificates and vault API integration. - Owned Microsoft Teams app governance for 50+ teams, reviewing an initial ~400 apps for security compliance and establishing a controlled approval workflow aligned with corporate and cyber standards. - Designed and deployed a Microsoft Teams domain-whitelisting system using Azure Automation, PowerShell, and Logic Apps to control external communications across the organization during a security response. - Contributed full-stack features (UI components, APIs, and PostgreSQL schema) for scheduling and approval workflows on an internal communications platform. - Drove infrastructure CVE remediation across team servers — patching automation dependencies, coordinating MongoDB upgrades, and restricting SSH access — owning the application-level changes Cyber Security required. ## Resume projects ### Payment and Booking System Next.js, React, TypeScript, PostgreSQL, Square Payments, Tailwind CSS, Nix - Delivered a production system accepting customer bookings with Square Web Payments and server-side validation across 15+ error mappings. - Built a checkout flow with server-authoritative pricing — all amounts recomputed from the database at payment time, rejecting client-supplied values. - Implemented a time-slot hold system that prevents double-booking by merging active holds with confirmed bookings against available capacity. - Led infrastructure migration from single VPS to server cluster with NetBird WireGuard mesh networking and Nix-based CI/CD pipeline with Trivy scanning. ### Service Cluster Docker, NetBird, MinIO, pgBackRest, Traefik, Wazuh, Nix - Architected and operated a server cluster with NetBird WireGuard mesh networking, managing ~50 containerized services across production workloads including source control, identity, search, and monitoring. - Designed backup and disaster recovery strategy with pgBackRest dual-repository architecture, TDE-aware WAL archiving, and automated restore pipeline. - Resolved 200+ critical CVEs across deployed services, VPS servers, and development systems — maintaining a clean security posture across the entire infrastructure. - Deployed a security stack with Transparent Data Encryption, field-level AES-256-GCM encryption via KMS, mutual TLS with PKI-managed certificates, and PostgreSQL Row-Level Security policies. ### LLM Inference and Agent Platform vLLM, LiteLLM, Ollama, TypeScript, Embeddings - Designed server hardware requirements and deployed AI inference infrastructure serving a large language model via vLLM with LiteLLM API proxy. - Built a deterministic enforcement layer to validate agent behavior against architectural constraints — using static policy checks, session log replay, and CI linting. - Architected a hybrid retrieval system combining graph traversal over linked notes with vector embedding search and keyword fallback. - Created a tool ecosystem of 14+ capabilities — from vault search and web browsing to code intelligence and system automation — each with structured schemas and deterministic error handling. ### Realty Engagement Platform TypeScript, Next.js, React Native, Express, PostgreSQL, Firebase, Apple APNs - Built a complete platform around a thin mobile client — Express REST API, Next.js admin dashboard, and authentication service — with a single PostgreSQL database serving all layers. - Designed a notification-driven data freshness system using short-term and long-term memory with selective cache invalidation, keeping the app current without constant polling or excessive API/battery cost. - Enforced per-user data isolation with PostgreSQL Row-Level Security and transaction-scoped identity injection via middleware, ensuring users can only retrieve their own records at the database level. - Shipped a production React Native app to iOS and Android, including the native configuration and integration work required for store release. ## Education Texas State University · B.S. Technology Management (Electronics Technology), Minor in Computer Science · 2019 ## Case studies ### Payment & Booking https://zanesaul.com/projects/payment-booking-system Sole engineer · 2024 – present · Live Stack: Next.js, TypeScript, PostgreSQL, Square, Cloudflare Email, Google Places A service business books and checks out on the site. The owner posts availability. Customers pick a slot. The owner gets a calendar alert; the customer gets a receipt and a calendar file. Before this, the usual loop was: an email on the site, a conversation about needs, a meeting, then a charge in Square. I built booking and checkout into the site so that loop is gone. The owner puts availability up. People pick a time and finish on the page. The owner gets a calendar alert with what they need for the job. The customer lands on a confirmation they cannot guess their way into someone else's booking, plus a receipt and an .ics — phones that scan mail often drop it on the calendar without extra taps. ### Real estate agent app https://zanesaul.com/projects/realty-engagement-platform Sole engineer · 2024 – 2026 · iOS and Android Stack: React Native, Next.js, Express, PostgreSQL, Firebase, Apple APNs A mobile app on the App Store and Play Store that owners can put in customers’ hands. New agents get a path to start and grow — including coaching they pay for. Two owners in real estate asked for a product they could take to other agents — a thing people open on a phone, in both stores. I sat with them on what it had to do. New agents get a path to start and grow; paid coaching and tools sit behind the same login. I built the phone app, the admin site, and the API on one database. ### Production environment https://zanesaul.com/projects/service-cluster Designed and operate it · 2024 – present · In production Stack: Docker, NetBird, Traefik, MinIO, pgBackRest, Wazuh, Nix ~50 services across the machines. This portfolio is one of them. I needed a place my products could live without putting databases, source, secrets, and backups on the public internet. Three roles: an edge the world can touch, a private path between machines, and a hub for everything that should never face the world. Source, identity, search, copies, and this site all sit in that split. ### Private AI https://zanesaul.com/projects/ai-agent-platform Designed and operate it · 2024 – present · Running Stack: vLLM, LiteLLM, Ollama, TypeScript, pgvector I run the models next to the notes and the code. Both sit behind tools with a contract. That agreement sits next to rules that decide what may leave. The project's information used to leave the building as a paste into someone else's system. That host then held the collection, and anyone on that side could see it. The access is what I took back onto a box I run. My machine still has to make the collection usable. I control the project's information and who can see it, with a picture precise enough to change the right files while sending less of that collection out. ### Dell — conferencing and collaboration https://zanesaul.com/projects/dell-enterprise-integration Software Engineer II · 2019 – 2024 · Dell Technologies Stack: PowerShell, Python, Azure Automation, Logic Apps, Power BI, Teams API, Zoom API Five years owning voice, conferencing, policies, and app access at Fortune 500 scale. A company that large ran those lanes on a pile of scripts you could not trust, and I turned that pile into one library driven by the database. I owned enterprise voice, conferencing, policies, app access, and the app review. I held that remit for a company that used those systems at a very large scale. A footprint that large meant that if those lanes broke, the break came to me. What I built under that ownership was the automation that kept those services running. The same scope also put me in the security-champion seat for a 40-person team: secrets, and whatever cyber sent back.