Zeke Lares — Head of Software Engineering

00 At a glance

0+ Years shipping production software from BI reports to global IoT fleets

0 Orders of magnitude of API growth led at Butlr since 2022

0 Open source systems projects all Rust, all built in the open

0 Book on AI driven cancer research manuscript complete

01 About

I'm Ezequiel "Zeke" Lares, Head of Software Engineering at Butlr, where I lead backend, IoT, and infrastructure. I set technical direction for the org while staying close enough to the code to be dangerous.

My path runs from being the first corporate developer at an engineering firm to scaling an API by several orders of magnitude. Along the way: secure VPN backends at Norton, spatial data ontologies at Mapped, and a sensing platform at Butlr that understands buildings without ever pointing a camera at anyone.

A lot of my work lives where engineering meets AI: putting LLMs into real production paths, not demos. Off the clock, I run an open source cancer research project and wrote a book about it.

02 Career

Fifteen years of shipping backends that have to stay up.

From BI reports and internal tooling to global IoT fleets and APIs at internet scale: each role one step deeper into systems and leadership.

2022 to present Butlr Head of Software Engineering

I lead engineering across backend, IoT, and infrastructure, and still spend most of my time building.

Scaled API traffic by several orders of magnitude while growing the fleet to tens of thousands of continuously streaming sensors.

Cut monthly cloud spend nearly in half even as the fleet kept growing.

Defined the company's data model: the canonical definitions and boundaries for customers, sites, buildings, rooms, zones, and sensors.

Led the major migrations end to end: moving the core datastore, overhauling and eventually replacing the device messaging layer, and bringing the entire time series history in house.

Handle the engineering side of security and compliance.

2021 to 2022 Mapped Senior Software Engineer

Led the IoT Connector work: extracting, normalizing, and integrating third party IoT device data into Mapped's unified building data API.

Designed the IoT Brick ontology for spatial, teleconference, and weather sensors, backed by an internal graph database.

Built and maintained core backend services for reliability and scalability.

2021 PriceSpider Software Engineer III

Backend engineer on WhereToBuy, the company's core product, while the team moved its Kubernetes cluster to AWS.

Ramped up quickly on a large production codebase and shipped updates across the backend services.

2019 to 2021 NortonLifeLock Principal Software Engineer

Helped architect the OAuth2 and JWT authentication layer for Norton's new secure, serverless VPN backend.

Found vulnerabilities on the SurfEasy site and worked on closing GDPR and PCI compliance gaps in payment processing.

Trimmed the AWS footprint, cutting overprovisioned resources and meaningfully lowering the monthly bill.

2018 to 2019 CU Direct Principal Software Engineer

Part of the Loan Origination System team, the platform behind auto lending for credit unions, and led its modernization effort.

Put development practices in place across the team: code coverage metrics, automation standards, and consistent delivery processes.

2016 to 2018 Symantec Senior Software Engineer

Started a companywide cloud aggregator service, a graph database fronted by GraphQL, to pull Norton's scattered backend systems into one queryable layer.

One of a handful of engineers on a small team taking on problems across the company, like integrating LifeLock into the Norton ecosystem.

Spent a year as interim product owner and built the customer screens for activation, upgrades, and renewals.

2013 to 2016 Moffatt & Nichol Senior Software Engineer

First corporate developer: established source control, documentation, deployment testing, the data warehouse, and web architecture.

Lead architect and developer for the internal site automating job, proposal, strategic initiative, and pursuit evaluation requests, serving 600+ users across 5 countries.

Automated daily exchange rates for 165 currencies, saving 400+ hrs/yr.

2011 to 2013 HMC Architects Software Engineer

Reverse engineered the firm's financial Income Statement, saving $10k+ and two months of development.

Lead developer for ReportGen, an automated report generator distributing SSRS reports by email and to SharePoint.

Lead BI developer for the firm's CRM report tracking performance, scheduling, and estimated at completion profit, reshaping how projects were planned.

2009 to 2011 County of Humboldt IT Application Analyst

First industry role: supported and built internal applications for county departments while finishing a CS degree at Humboldt.

03 Independent research

Open-source · AI-driven Cancer Therapy Mechanisms & Evidence

A Cross-Literature SynthesisE. Lares

I spent my nights teaching AI to read cancer research.

A cross-literature synthesis that maps where cancer-therapy research is concentrated, where the gaps are real versus artifacts, and which mechanistic ideas deserve broader comparison — then uses Monte Carlo and spatial simulations as a claim-testing engine. Open-source and free forever.

4,830

full-text papers

19

mechanisms

22

cancer types

2001–26

span

A simulation library written in Rust with Python bindings (MIT-licensed). The simulations bound the conditions under which a hypothesis could hold — they're computational predictions, not modality verdicts. Manuscript complete; headed to Amazon.

View on GitHub Read the story

04 Open source

A systems lab, built in the open.

Foundational infrastructure written from scratch in Rust — durable, crash-safe, and frugal by design. Each project uses AI to mine prior art and adversarially verify every load-bearing claim before trusting it.

IronBus

A durable, crash-safe message queue for the edge — in one static Rust binary.

One ordered queue that survives power loss and self-heals against corrupt files with bounded, reported loss. SQS-style visibility leases, group-commit fdatasync durability, and zero-copy fan-out — drops onto a Raspberry Pi with no JVM and no dependencies. Verified with deterministic crash-injection simulation.

RustEdge / IoTDurabilitymusl static

Early implementation · CI-gated PRs

IronCache

The most efficient Redis-compatible cache — in one static Rust binary.

A shared-nothing, thread-per-core engine that speaks RESP2/RESP3 and keeps the Redis contract — built for maximal throughput per core and minimal memory per item. Borrows the best from Dragonfly, Valkey, and the modern eviction literature (W-TinyLFU, S3-FIFO, SIEVE), with forkless snapshots.

RustRedis-compatibleThread-per-coreio_uring

Spec & first engine slice

IronAuth

A modern, standards first OpenID Connect identity platform.

Multi tenant, multi environment, EdDSA first, built toward a certified OIDC core with the conformance suite wired into CI as a merge gate. One repository holds the provider server, management APIs, SDKs, admin SPA, and hosted auth pages. Single static binary on PostgreSQL.

RustOIDC / OAuthIdentityEdDSA

Foundations in progress

IronTraffic

A traffic and API manager in one Rust binary.

An L4 and L7 load balancer, reverse proxy, API gateway, and Kubernetes ingress controller in a single binary, with a dashboard that can actually change things. Zero downtime for both configuration and binary swaps: atomic snapshot apply plus descriptor handoff, connections preserved across each.

RustLoad balancingAPI gatewayIngress

Foundational development

cancer_research

Open-source, AI-driven cancer-therapy research — and the engine behind the book.

A cross-literature synthesis of 4,830 papers plus a Monte Carlo and spatial simulation library (MIT-licensed Rust, with Python bindings) that bounds the conditions under which mechanistic claims could hold. The codebase behind the manuscript — free forever.

RustPythonSimulationOpen science

Active · manuscript complete

05 Recognition

iF Design Award · Winner Product Design · Building Technology 2025

Butlr AI Platform for Private Spatial Intelligence: anonymous people sensing that uses body heat and AI to understand presence, movement, and occupancy without ever capturing an identity.

Won by the Butlr platform, where I lead engineering. See the winner listing.

Cal Poly Humboldt · NOW Research feature Jul 2008

I'm really used to working by myself. Now, working with a partner, listening to his ideas — it's more creative and stimulates my ideas, too.

— Zeke, featured as an undergraduate researcher in "Computer Design A Big Hit", on the NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates program.

Research abstract: Spring 2009 ECS abstract booklet (PDF)

06 Writing

Notes from the engineering trenches.

Scaling stories, AI in production, and the occasional detour into open science.

JOURNEY9 min

Four Years at Butlr: A Journey in Commits

A dozen people and about a hundred sensors when I joined. Thousands of sensors around the world today. The road between, as my commit history remembers it.

Read

AI9 min

Putting AI in the Critical Path

Shipping LLMs into real production systems — not demos. What it took to trust a model enough to put it on the hot path.

Read

OPEN SCIENCE7 min

Why I Spent My Nights Simulating Cancer Cells in Rust

A side project that turned into 4,830 papers, a simulation engine, and a book. Here's what building it taught me.

Read

All writing

Let's build something that scales.

Open to conversations about engineering leadership, AI in production, and the cancer-research project. The fastest way to reach me is email.

ezequiel.lares@outlook.com LinkedIn GitHub