Brian Zanti
Verified Expert in Engineering
Software Developer
Denver, CO, United States
Toptal member since March 5, 2026
Brian is a senior full-stack engineer who takes ownership of complex systems from concept to production. In his six years as an engineer, he has specialized in secure Rails APIs, maintained production infrastructure in AWS, and shipped user-friendly interfaces in React and React Native. He focuses on building practical, reliable systems and prioritizing work that drives meaningful business outcomes.
Portfolio
Experience
- JavaScript - 10 years
- Ruby - 8 years
- Ruby on Rails (RoR) - 8 years
- TypeScript - 4 years
- React - 2 years
- Amazon Web Services (AWS) - 1 year
- React Native - 1 year
- Terraform - 1 year
Preferred Environment
Ruby, React, React Native, Terraform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), MacOS
The most amazing...
...thing I've built is a credential and identity platform integrating encrypted NFC passes and BLE scanners for secure access control.
Work Experience
Senior Full-stack Developer
SurePass
- Led the development of a credential and access management platform used by 2,000+ law enforcement officials, owning architecture, delivery, and execution across back-end, mobile, and web teams.
- Designed and delivered core services under accelerated, high-stakes timelines, enabling the Colorado State Patrol to coordinate around 200 officers across approximately 20 teams during major events.
- Architected and owned a Rails REST API and data models powering web and mobile clients, delivering secure, consistent access while managing complex entity lifecycles across APIs, background jobs, and client applications.
- Designed and evolved flexible RBAC and fine-grained authorization models supporting multiple customer personas, adapting roles and permissions as new products were introduced while minimizing integration friction.
- Contributed key features to a React Native application, including NFC reading/writing, Bluetooth capabilities, image capture, authentication, TypeScript support, and automated tests covering 35% of the application code.
- Built core React features for administrative workflows, including user and permission management, bulk CSV imports, and up-to-date analytics dashboards.
- Improved system performance, reliability, and security by implementing robust observability (logging, metrics, alerts), hardening authentication and RBAC, optimizing bulk data workflows, and establishing on-call rotations.
- Enhanced cloud infrastructure using AWS and Terraform, managing production deployments, automating cross-account database backups, enforcing least-privilege access, and establishing infrastructure best practices.
- Built application features and data flows compliant with HIPAA and SOC 2 security frameworks.
Software Developer
The Feed
- Developed a feature to supplement the order fulfillment process, increasing throughput by 25%.
- Implemented rate shopping logic to reduce shipping costs on 10% of shipments.
- Developed a feature to automatically resolve issues impacting 7% of total sales, replacing manual intervention.
- Improved test coverage by 3x, introduced libraries, and wrote reusable factories to establish testing best practices.
- Minimized downtime by diagnosing and deploying same-day fixes for production bottlenecks and scaling issues.
Software Developer
The Turing School of Software and Design
- Architected an automated attendance tracking application used by 30 staff members daily, saving $1,650 and 33 employee hours weekly.
- Satisfied key department of education compliance standards to earn the nation's first coding bootcamp accreditation.
- Integrated Slack, Zoom, and Populi APIs to normalize cross-platform data flow, implementing rate limiting, retries, caching, and health monitoring to ensure system reliability at scale.
Experience
SurePass API
I designed a fine-grained RBAC system across multiple customer personas, enforcing strict access boundaries throughout the platform. I also built a sophisticated checkpoint clearance system. Administrators could define custom qualification rules per checkpoint, ensuring only qualified officers were cleared for entry at each location.
On the hardware and mobile side, I configured NFC scanners at checkpoints and added NFC reading and Bluetooth capabilities to the mobile devices used to scan and verify officers. Finally, I built an event-based change-tracking system to capture all data mutations across the platform and ensured that all data flows met HIPAA and SOC 2 requirements.
Education
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Engineering
University of Virginia - Charlottesville, Virginia, USA
Skills
Libraries/APIs
React, REST APIs, jQuery
Tools
AI Prompts, Claude, Claude Code, Terraform
Languages
Ruby, JavaScript, TypeScript, CSS, HTML
Frameworks
Ruby on Rails (RoR), Material UI, React Native, Ruby on Rails 7, Ruby on Rails 5
Paradigms
Testing, Role-based Access Control (RBAC)
Platforms
MacOS, Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Other
Software, Full-stack, Full-stack Development, Web Development, Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC), API Design, Data Modeling, Query Optimization, Background Jobs, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Computer Architecture, Algorithms, Performance Optimization, Operating Systems, Hardware, Programming, Communication, Research, Engineering, Agentic AI
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