Senior Software Engineer (Acting Staff) @ Zillow
Frank Chan
Jimenez
I build platforms that connect people, systems that think, and tools that developers actually want to use.
About
I'm a Senior Software Engineer (Acting Staff) at Zillow where I architect the Connections & Communications Platform - the system that connects millions of home buyers to real estate professionals across Zillow, Trulia, StreetEasy, and HotPads.
I also lead our Agentic Platform, building AI-powered orchestration systems that drive workflows across 30+ teams. Before that, I built platform infrastructure at Illuminate Education and did physics research at Carnegie Mellon.
Outside of work, I'm deep in the agent stack - cataloging the design patterns that make LLM-powered systems actually work in production, building memory engines for AI, and shipping developer tools in Go and JavaScript. Less vibes, more blueprints.
Projects
OpenAgent
↗Agentic Design Pattern Catalog
30+ framework-agnostic, production-tested patterns for building autonomous AI systems.
OpenMem
↗Memory Engine for AI Agents
Deterministic retrieval via BM25, spreading activation, and competition scoring. Ships as a Claude Code plugin.
drift
↗Database Migration Tool
Everything Flyway paywalls is free. Undo, dry-run, cherry-pick, drift detection, schema diff, linting.
mdcat
↗Terminal Markdown Pager
Full-colour rendering, syntax highlighting, incremental search, mouse support, and .docx export.
Experience
Full resumeZillow
2020 - PresentSenior Software Engineer (Acting Staff Engineer)
Connections & Communications Platform · Agentic Platform
- Architected agentic orchestration platform powering AI workflows across 30+ teams
- Built multi-channel communications platform processing 1B+ messages/year across 4 subsidiaries
- Led cross-org AI adoption strategy aligning Data Engineering, Product, and Platform teams
- Migrated 100+ distributed services to EKS, defining platform standards for 200+ engineers
Illuminate Education
2018 - 2020Software Engineer, Platforms & Architecture
- Architected platform services at 6,000+ req/sec peak, serving 2,000 districts and 15M+ students
- Shipped CI/CD pipeline and developer tooling adopted by 200+ engineers
- Built automated multi-tenant provisioning, reducing onboarding from days to minutes
Carnegie Mellon University
2015 - 2016Physics Data Researcher
- Designed instrumentation for Q-Band E.P.R. Machine used to observe molecular compounds
- Developed Python computational models for Helmholtz Coil phenomena, adopted by researchers at two universities