Meet a Grunt
Zach Goldberg
Chief Technical Officer
Zach Goldberg is a seasoned tech entrepreneur, innovation enthusiast, and author with a "founder's mentality" who believes that engineering software should be more science than art.
A passionate learner, leader, and executive, Zach is one of the rare CTOs who has cultivated extensive, nuanced, and proven expertise that spans industries while serving numerous startups and scaled organizations, including Microsoft, Google, Dama Financial, Savvy Insurance and Lottery.com. Driven by his belief that hiring well, building a collaborative culture, and encouraging teams to reimagine what is possible leads to transformative results, Zach is committed to helping establish creative environments that technologists can actually enjoy working in while developing and delivering world-class software.
Most recently, he has poured his expert insights into his first book, The Startup CTO Handbook, which cleverly guides current and aspiring tech leaders through the often overlooked challenges of building tech startups (from hiring and firing to performance management, navigating tech debt, and making technical decisions as a team). In 2018, Zach founded Advance The World, a non-profit organization whose mission is to inspire youth with an interest in science, technology engineering, and mathematics (STEM) via thrilling experiences that expose students to the science behind airplanes and race cars by placing them inside those same vehicles. He has been invited as a guest for high-profile tech-world podcasts, including a discussion of his book on DevInterrupted, and has published articles that explore the hidden truths of technology development. His first Toptal article, "The Six Commandments of Good Code: Write Code That Stands the Test of Time" earned 100,000 hits.
Zach received his Bachelors of Science & Engineering in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania, where he was the first undergraduate ever to develop, lecture, and grade a net-new course curriculum (CIS-399 | Special Topics in Linux: Computer Science in a Modern Unix/Linux Environment) before graduation. He served as captain of the Penn Electric Racing team and President of STWing. An avid reader and multi-passionate professional, Zach speaks English, French, and Mandarin, regularly releases reading lists and book reports via his website (zachgoldberg.com), and holds both a private pilot’s license with an instrument rating and an amateur competitive race car driver’s license.
