Software Engineer - Observability & AI Tracing

Zane Lee

Software Engineer

*********@*****.*** Charleston, SC runretriever.app linkedin.com/in/zane-lee github.com/Kcstills17

PROFILE

I am a software engineer based in Charleston SC. I am a co-creator of Retriever, an AWS-deployed observability platform enabling AI-powered trace analysis through a custom MCP server. I have several years of experience in the Ruby and Javascript ecosystems. Additionally I am comfortable with AWS, Docker, and technologies in the AI sector, such as RAG and Vector embedding.

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

Co-Creator & Developer- Retriever

Retriever case study: runretriever.app

2025 – Present

•Designed and built a custom MCP server enabling natural-language trace queries through LLMs, bridging observability data with AI-powered debugging workflows for microservices teams

•Optimized LLM context consumption through intelligent data distillation, extracting only critical span attributes (error types, latencies, status codes) from verbose OTLP trace structures

•Implemented end-to-end JWT authentication for both MCP server and UI services using AWS Secrets Manager, with cookie-based session management via custom auth-proxy middleware

•Designed and deployed supporting infrastructure for services using Terraform as IaC

•Authored technical case study documenting architectural decisions, trade-off analysis (Fargate vs EC2, OpenSearch vs Elasticsearch), and deployment patterns for small team adoption

•Collaborated remotely with 3 other engineers across the country Software Engineer

Open-sourced project

2022 – 2025

Request Basket: A full stack debugging application that allows for users to create baskets, unique short URLs that collect inbound api/webhook requests for inspection. This contains an interactive UI for managing baskets and viewing requests and a backend architecture to support high volume webhook ingestion.

Manga Chat Bot: A RAG based conversational AI chatbot that uses vector embeddings and semantic similarity to deliver personalized manga recommendations via natural langauge. Basketball Shoes: A microservice e-commerce application that utilizes feature flags to easily induce errors. This application was created to help test Retriever's MCP server. Data Entry

Fedex Freight

2020 – 2025

EDUCATION

Launch School

Multi-year, mastery-based software engineer curriculum. Read more at launchschool.com/employers

2022 – 2025

SKILLS

Backend

Ruby, Python, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, ElasticSearch/OpenSearch, REST API, Node.js, SSE, Sinatra, JWT Authentication, Bcrypt

Frontend

Javascript(ES6), Typescript, React, DOM API, JQuery, HTML/CSS Tooling

Git/Github, Docker, Linux, Infrastructure Automation, CLI tools, Cloud Infrastructure

AWS, EC2, ECS, S3 Buckets, VPC, ALB, IGWs,, SGs, Secrets Manager, NAT Gateways, IaC/Terraform AI Tooling

RAG apps, MCP servers, Agentic Ai, Context Window Optimization, Data Distillation, LLM Prompt Engineering, AI Agent Authentication, Token Efficient Data Formatting, Vector Databases, Vector Embeddings, OpenAI API Observability Tooling

OpenTelemetry, OTLP, Jaeger, Prometheus, AlertManager

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