Zack Owens

About Zack Owens

Distributed systems engineer and architect focused on the internals of petabyte-scale databases, from storage formats and query engines to cost modeling and cloud-native infrastructure.At New Relic, I own the technical strategy for NRDB, a custom timeseries database that ingests, stores and queries petabytes of telemetry data per day across metrics, events, logs, and traces. My work sits at the intersection of deep systems engineering and business impact: designing the architectures that move gross margins, building the platforms that unlock new product lines and mentoring the engineers who carry it forward.Areas of depth: distributed database internals, columnar storage and query engines, batch and stream processing, Kafka, Kubernetes, cloud-native architecture (AWS/Azure), infrastructure cost optimization, technical strategy and organizational leadership.

Experience

1. Principal Software Engineer

   New Relic

   Apr 2021 — Present · Portland, OR, US

   Technical leader for NRDB, a petabyte-scale custom timeseries database powering New Relic\'s observability platform across metrics, events, logs, and traces- Identified that streaming-first metric processing was the fundamental cost barrier to unlimited cardinality, placed a multi-year architectural bet on batch-first processing. The At Rest Processing platform delivered 80% cost reduction and became a company-wide primitive powering alerts, scorecards, data deletion, data import, indexing and materialized views across multiple product lines- Directed a cost optimization portfolio totaling >$25M in annualized savings, contributing to a 780 basis point YOY GAAP gross margin improvement. Created the cost-attribution framework adopted by Finance to bridge engineering metrics and financial reporting- Led data architecture for the Logs product: expanded retention options, columnar storage, and access controls targeting 2x logs product line revenue- Led cross-organizational delivery of unlimited cardinality metrics, coordinating engineering teams across two continents to ship a pricing tier that renewed the company\'s largest customer by ARR- Authored the NRDB cloud-native architecture vision for a 50+-engineer organization, evolving NRDB from lift-and-shift to cellular architecture with autoscaling and multi-region isolation, improving availability from 99.5% to 99.99%- Built a columnar file format for dimensional metric storage optimized for high-cardinality workloads- Shaped data platform strategy at the CTO and Chief Architect level across the full observability stack. Served as senior technical escalation for strategic customers, engaging directly with customer CTOs on architecture decisions- Built a Principal Engineer cohort across the data platform group with architectural decision-making structures that scaled technical leadership beyond personal involvement. Grew multiple engineers to Principal and Lead Staff levels through direct mentorship.

Education

• Indiana University Bloomington

  Bachelor of Science, Computer Science

Skills

• Git
• Cassandra
• Go
• Software Development
• Saas
• Rust
• Agile Methodologies
• Linux
• Service-Oriented Architecture (Soa)
• Apache Kafka
• Javascript
• Amazon Web Services (Aws)
• Node.js
• Mysql
• Distributed Systems
• Domain-Driven Design (Ddd)
• Cloud Computing
• Redis
• Java
• Microservices
• Rest