Summary
Zac Walker is a seasoned software leader with 14 years of experience at Microsoft and a multi-decade engineering background spanning systems, cloud and desktop platforms. As Principal Rustacean he now drives migration of mission-critical backend services to Rust, building on prior work modernizing cloud, ARM and native platform stacks. He has led cross-functional teams to deliver zero-downtime cloud migrations at massive scale and founded Microsoft’s contribution to the Windows-on-arm64 GNU toolchain after spotting a gap in developer tooling. Zac combines hands-on systems programming (C/C++ to Rust) with engineering management, coaching engineers on hardware-specific optimizations and platform integration. Based in Prague, he pairs pragmatic agile practices from his consulting days with deep technical ownership of performance, stability and security. An intuitive problem-solver, he repeatedly turns low-level platform challenges into production-ready solutions and community-backed toolchains.
14 years of coding experience
23 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Applied Science - Computing, Computer Science, Bachelor of Applied Science - Computing, Computer Science at Queensland University of Technology