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. 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 love zero-to-one.

At Block, I was the founding engineer hired to build the "c=" Lightning business. 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. Building from scratch with a great team is the most fun for me. Even better if I get to learn a new domain!

02

I've operated at small and large scale.

At a place like Google, I operated with scales like Tbps, exabytes, and Mqps. Other times, I've worked with quantities and customers I could count on my fingers. They're all different phases of building a business, so small-scale matters too. I really enjoy getting the technology right for any scale.

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, 99.9% 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. At Fugue, I led developer docs for a time as well. Writing is how I solidify my understanding, 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 working on some personal and professional development through some projects.

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 cloud infrastructure security and control 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
Personal projects

Learning by building

OpenFerris

A personal AI assistant built for myself on self-hosted, multi-GPU inference. Mostly done as a self-guided learning project in building useful things on top of inference.

View on GitHub →

More learning by building

domz-llm

A hands-on lab for learning LLM internals from the ground up. I wrote the code, and a "Socratic" AI tutor helped me to really understand what's happening inside the models I work with every day.

View on GitHub →
Five outdoor benches, stripped and refinished

Off-keyboard

Refinishing benches

I enjoy building with my hands, too. I sanded, tightened, and refinished five outdoor benches for my kids' school. Really fun to to bring something worn back to good working order, and the kids appreciate it.

Tooling

review_team

From February 2026, a team of agent reviewers (targeting Claude) that triages large pull requests and points you at what actually deserves attention. This kind of thing later became a built-in skill in coding harnesses.

View on GitHub →

Languages

Rust Java Python Go TypeScript

Infrastructure & Cloud

AWS (ECS, Lambda, DynamoDB, EC2) Google Cloud Platform, esp. GCS Serverless, some K8s OLAP, event streaming, telemetry Backend/distributed systems

Practices & Complements

Technical leadership (incl. management) Reliability engineering (SRE) Product management Startup co-founding Technical writing & presentation

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.