Staff Engineer · Technical Lead · Builder

Dominic
Zippilli

Engineer, founder, and PM with deep experience in cloud infrastructure, distributed systems, and storage. Co-founded a venture-backed startup ($70M+ raised). Built the Lightning payment infrastructure behind Cash App and Square. Advised Google Cloud's largest storage and analytics customers.

Dominic Zippilli
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My story
01

I've built things from nothing.

As a co-founder and principal architect at Fugue, I went from blank slate to production — leading design of the first iterations of what became Fugue's infrastructure-as-code SaaS. At Block, I was the founding engineer hired to build the "c=" Lightning business. Going zero-to-one with a great team is the most fun for me.

02

I've operated at Google scale.

I spent almost five years at Google — first as a Solutions Architect advising large accounts across verticals: Twitter, OpenAI, Vera Rubin Observatory (VRO), Citadel, and Two Sigma. I focused on storage for high-throughput cloud workloads. Then I worked as a PM for Google Cloud Storage, where I drove features in the GCS client SDKs and initiated a major infrastructure feature (hierarchical namespace) now accelerating large-scale AI dataset training.

03

I've led teams through hard reliability work.

At Block, I led the 5-person team behind Lightning Network infrastructure for Cash App and Square — ~1.5M transactions per month at peak, the world's 5th-largest routing node by capacity, 99.95% node uptime. Fast-moving tech, real money, production stakes. My roots in this kind of work began with the United States Coast Guard, where I learned to build safety-critical, highly reliable messaging systems.

04

I write and think about what I build.

During my Google years I wrote practical technical pieces published in the official Google Cloud Medium publication — on predicting GCS retrieval costs, building storage object inventories in BigQuery, and monitoring egress at scale. Writing is how I confirm what I've learned — and how I share it.

Experience
Consulting & Personal Projects
Mar 2026 – Present
Founder & Principal

Exploring new domains and learning through work.

Founded QKV Consulting, an independent practice focused on AI integration and technical strategy. Currently working with a DC-area cybersecurity firm on AI integration in their workflow, plus architecture and infrastructure work on their Department of Veterans Affairs contract — advising on supply chain risk management guidance and observability, and stabilizing self-hosted Kubernetes and Mac-based inference services.

Also learning-by-building OpenFerris, my AI personal assistant built with Unix philosophy, running on self-hosted multi-GPU inference.

AI IntegrationLLMs PythonRust CybersecurityFederal / VA
Block
Dec 2022 – Feb 2026
Staff Backend Engineer
Technical Lead

Lightning infrastructure powering Cash App and Square.

Technical Lead for Block's Lightning Network infrastructure, leading a 5-person team powering all Bitcoin Lightning sends and receives across Cash App and Square — roughly 1.5 million transactions per month at peak.

Built and operated 10 Lightning nodes from the ground up — four each behind Cash App and Square for redundancy, plus two public routing nodes, one of them the world's 5th-largest by capacity. That node grew from zero to carrying most of Cash App's Lightning sends, earning the ~10% annualized routing yield Block discussed publicly. Held 99.95% node uptime throughout.

RustJava PythonAWS ECS Lightning NetworkTechnical Lead
Google
May 2018 – Dec 2022
(4y 8mo)
PM + Solutions Architect

From advising OpenAI and VRO to founding a major GCS feature.

Spent three years as a Solutions Architect serving Google Cloud's largest and most complex accounts — Twitter, OpenAI, VRO, Citadel, and Two Sigma among them. Specialized in cost-effective, high-QPS object storage architectures for analytics and ML workloads at scale.

Transitioned to Product Management for Google Cloud Storage. Drove improvements to the GCS client SDKs and became the founding PM and internal champion for Hierarchical Namespace — a technically demanding rework of GCS object metadata, born from my SA work with customers whose data pipelines needed real directory semantics. Now launched and accelerating large-scale AI dataset training.

Google Cloud StorageGCSFUSE Object StorageProduct Management Solutions Architecture

Writing from this period → medium.com/@domzippilli

Fugue
Sep 2013 – Jun 2017
(3y 10mo)
Co-founder & Principal Architect

Zero to $70M raised: building a cloud DSL from scratch.

One of four co-founders of Fugue (now part of Snyk), which raised $70M+ during my tenure. Built the first working prototypes entirely on AWS in Python and led the early engineering organization through to release candidates that delivered critical real-world feedback.

Played a foundational role in designing Ludwig, a domain-specific language for cloud infrastructure. Authored open-source tooling (emulambda) for AWS Lambda local testing, and bootstrapped a technical documentation practice using CI-driven pipelines.

PythonAWS DSL DesignOpen Source Technical WritingFounding Team
Earlier
2005 – 2013
Various

Mission-critical systems, government, and consulting.

Software engineer at Dell (US Coast Guard OSC) developing and maintaining a mission-critical enterprise service bus — the backbone for USCG information exchange covering vessel tracking, aviation weather, and marker buoy systems. Deep work in Java, JVM tuning, Linux administration, and OSI layer 3–7 diagnostics.

Later ran an independent consulting practice focused on resilient, scalable, toil-free architecture — including a prototype serverless application for NBC Universal built on AWS Lambda (C#), API Gateway, DynamoDB, and React.

JavaAWS Lambda ReactServerless Public sector

Languages

Rust Java Python JavaScript / TypeScript C# (.NET)

Infrastructure & Cloud

AWS (ECS, Lambda, DynamoDB, EC2) Google Cloud Platform / GCS CloudFormation / Serverless Lightning Network Distributed Systems / ESB

Practices

Technical Leadership (with reports) Reliability Engineering (SRE) Product Management Startup Co-founding Technical Writing & Developer Docs

Let's talk about
what's next.

I'm looking for my next role — somewhere I can build serious systems,
lead thoughtfully, and work on something that matters.