Delivering a unique perspective on business and innovation with exceptional results.

ZM Gehlke is an advisor with a proven record of delivering exceptional advice and technical systems. He’s designed customer sentiment platforms for Amazon Prime, calculation pipelines for Amazon Tax, and datacenter management for WarnerMedia. He’s helped those companies deliver outsized results for their shareholders.

Businesses struggle to deliver the right results. They struggle to innovate and fail to ride waves of change to success. Compounding that, they struggle to make the best use of staff, leading to under-performing their potential. Shareholders have been increasingly demanding on both fronts: expecting innovative plans for the future and expecting solid returns on their investment.

Mr Gehlke addresses both problems: helping businesses lay the groundwork for the future while delivering results today. His unique perspective guides companies down the path of innovation – offering tips and ideas for development. His influence steers teams to perform at their best, delivering exemplary results.

A partnership with Mr Gehlke can bring both benefits to your business as well. After a brief onboarding to learn about your needs, your strengths, and your market, Mr Gehlke will address both aspects of your business: improving performance today while building to the future.

Start the discussion about your future success today: contact@zmichaelgehlke.com

A Scholar

Mr Gehlke has worked as both an employee and consultant in a number of technical roles for the past decade. He started as a software developer and then team lead at a now-defunct marketing startup – at which he oversaw gamification, lift analysis, and abuse prevention. Following that, he spent a short time as a consultant before returning to full time employment at Amazon. He then returned to consulting at HBO, boomeranged to Amazon for a second employment stint, before settling into consulting for the past two years. Mr Gehlke has written whitepapers on effective semantics, a new approach to unifying tensor networks with formal reasoning. His list of publications can be viewed [here], via the SpacePowerMonkey lab. Mr Gehlke has also published open source software, primarily for data analysis. Those tools can be viewed [here].

Here are highlights of that career:

Employer Job Date
Symetra Cloud Migration Support 2021.07 - 2021.12
In a 6-month contract, I assisted Symetra with two things: migrating their systems to AWS and adopting Agile practices, both part of their modernization effort.

Key Accomplishments

- I introduced AWS-CDK and cloud design practices to client; and, - I persuaded my client Symetra to not go forward with some portions of AWS migration, such as print spool servers.

Technologies & Skills

AWS - EC2, Lambda; Azure; Docker, CDK; Python, C#
Amazon FinTech Global Tax Platform 2019.12 - 2021.01
From December 2019 to January 2021, I worked in Amazon Finance Technology as the tech lead on developing a new tax calculation platform. This platform allowed tax analysts to self-serve petascale tax pipelines and program them with efficient tax calculations. My role was leading the team on a buildout from a proof of concept to a production ready platform.

Key Accomplishments

- I facilitated team vision documents, such as PR-FAQ, to align team and stakeholders on project vision/direction; - I designed a compiler architecture to turn tax definitions into AWS CDK applications; - I worked with team to implement the front of the that compiler in 7 months; which, - moved the POC frontend of 4k lines in a single script to a modular design with over 1k tests.

Technologies & Skills

AWS - S3, RDS, EC2, Lambda, SNS, CloudWatch; Docker, CDK; Python, Typescript; compilers, formal methods
WarnerMedia Hybrid Cloud Design 2018.11 - 2019.10
In a 1-year contract, I assisted WarnerMedia with designing a hybrid-cloud management system for their datacenter and office, integrating: datacenter-local controllers for devices, servers, and IoT; facility-local sensors, eg network uptime monitors; and, cloud-based systems such as facility monitoring or application build pipelines.

Key Accomplishments

- I prototyped hybrid-cloud solution, compliant with corporate security policy; - I prototyped datacenter controllers, such as Mac Mini, IoT device, and rack power controllers; and, - I prototyped network (LAN + WAN) monitoring sensors.

Technologies & Skills

AWS - IAM, IOT, MQTT, Lambda; Docker, CDK; Typescript, Go; networking, datacenter, routers, LAN, WAN; IOT, raspberryPi, embedded
Amazon Devices Econometric Platform 2017.10 - 2018.08
I worked in Amazon Device Economics as a software engineer on their econometric modeling platform. This platform was used by the Devices and Prime organizations to model the preferences of Amazon customers based on surveys.

Key Accomplishments

- I acted as war room engineer while troubleshooting production issue for Prime; - I assisted leadership with the post mortem, including estimating damages; and, - I paired with our principal engineer to deisgn a new workflow engine which solved those issues.

Technologies & Skills

AWS - S3, EC2, Lambda, ECS; Docker, infrastructure as code; Ruby, Python, scipy, numpy; econometrics, machine learning, mathematics

Mr Gehlke also has a number of relevant credentials:

Degree Subject School From Until
BS Mathematics (Pure) Seattle University 2007-09 2010-06
BS Comp Sci + Soft Eng Seattle University 2007-09 2010-06
AS General Studies Edmonds Community College 2005-09 2007-06