Zi Makki
CTO / VP Engineering / Head of Engineering
Engineering leader and operator who builds the system around the product: teams, delivery operations, AI-augmented engineering practice, and the software or embedded stack underneath. Most recently scaled Wildflower into Barcelona's largest last-mile delivery operation while building an autonomous smart-locker platform and shipping LLM-powered agents into production. Earlier work spans turnarounds, zero-to-one market launches, and high-throughput platform rebuilds.
Selected impact
30 -> 1,000 parcels/day
Scaled Wildflower into one of Barcelona's largest last-mile delivery operations.
EUR130k -> EUR45k burn/month
Took over as CEO at 4Doctors and reset the cost base to extend runway.
13 -> 3,000+ books/day
Rebuilt The Book of Everyone platform from PHP to Elixir without service disruption.
Experience
Founder & CTO · Wildflower
Smart locker infrastructure and last-mile logistics
Founded and scaled a dual-track operation: a carrier-grade parcel delivery business and an autonomous locker platform spanning PCB design, Nerves firmware, and Phoenix/Ash services.
- Shipped an LLM-powered billing and support agent (GPT-4o tool-calling over Ash domain actions) into production, and extended the same agentic patterns into internal engineering workflows.
- Operate a distributed real-time IoT fleet (Nerves firmware + Phoenix/Ash backend) with telemetry, remote command, OTA updates, and fault-tolerant degradation.
- Built the internal operating stack for routing, barcode workflows, customer checkout, and field-driver tooling — and transitioned the operation into a TIPSA agency footprint.
Selected systems
- Arca.bot locker platform - PCB, firmware, telemetry, remote commands, and fleet management.
- DeliveryMap + Ninja - Back-office logistics operations with driver workflows and barcode handling.
- Arca Delivery checkout - Customer booking, Stripe payments, and TIPSA courier integration.
Interim Country CTO / VP Engineering · Prima
Spain launch for a venture-backed car-insurance scale-up
Hired and integrated the Spanish engineering team, aligned it with the Italian core platform, and launched the regulated Spanish car-insurance product in ten months.
- First employee in Spain; stood up the local engineering organisation and operating cadence from zero.
- Led delivery across multiple product squads in partnership with the Italian core platform, owning architectural and reliability decisions for the Spain stack.
CTO · Mipasa
Replatformed an unworkable Java estate onto Elixir
Joined to replace a brittle microservices stack, retrained the team on Elixir, and moved a prototype into production within six weeks.
- Delivered a production-superior prototype in six weeks and used it to replace the incumbent system.
- Scaled the engineering team by hiring 15 developers once the new platform direction was proven.
Prior leadership roles
CTO -> CEO · 4Doctors
Operator turnaround when the business problem outweighed the technical one
Moved from technology leadership into the CEO seat, re-cut the operating model, and created viable runway for the business to continue.
- Reduced burn rate from EUR130k to EUR45k per month.
- Reset the company around a workable commercial and delivery plan rather than further technical churn.
CTO · The Book of Everyone
High-throughput personalisation platform rebuilt in place
Led a strangler-pattern migration from legacy PHP through Laravel to Elixir/Phoenix for a personalised publishing platform with 150,000+ assets.
- Scaled throughput from roughly 13 books per day to 3,000+ with stable production behaviour.
- Relocated to Barcelona for the role and rebuilt the platform without a stop-the-world rewrite.
Founder & CTO · Shopa
Consumer social-commerce startup through Series A scale-up
Co-founded and built the product from the ground up, moving from the Microsoft ecosystem to Ruby on Rails and later Go where workloads demanded it.
- Raised one of the UK's largest Series A rounds of the period.
- Built a fast-moving engineering organisation while retooling the stack for startup speed and cost.
Senior Developer -> Head of Build & Release -> Actuarial Technology Consultant · Beazley
Six-year progression across engineering, delivery, and actuarial partnership
Progressed from hands-on development into change management and then actuarial technology consulting inside a major Lloyd's insurer.
- Introduced PowerShell-based CI/CD automation years before that approach was mainstream in Microsoft shops.
- Acted as the bridge between developers, DBAs, infrastructure, underwriting, and actuarial teams.
Earlier roles: Moneycorp and SPML / Lehman Brothers, London (2001-2006) - .NET delivery, team enablement, and mortgage / foreign-exchange systems.
Capabilities
- Leadership
- Org design, hiring, turnarounds, first-market launches, founder-to-scale-up transitions, regulated-industry delivery
- Platforms
- Elixir, Phoenix, Ash, LiveView, Postgres, distributed real-time systems, migrations
- AI engineering
- LLM agents, tool-calling, RAG, agentic SDLC, GPT-4o and Claude integration, AI-augmented developer workflows
- Embedded & operations
- Nerves, firmware, PCB design, device telemetry, logistics operations, payments
- Range
- Ruby, Go, Rust, .NET, internal tooling, zero-to-one product delivery