Zach Trocinski
CLOUD PLATFORM AND SOFTWARE ENGINEER
Profile
Cloud Solutions Architect and Cloud Engineer with 10+ years of Azure-focused experience spanning my entire career, leading Azure Landing Zones (ALZ) strategy, Infrastructure-as-Code platforms, enterprise cloud architecture, and large-scale customer migrations to Azure across Infrastructure and Apps workloads. Creator and lead of the ALZ-Bicep framework and Azure Verified Modules (AVM), adopted across hundreds of thousands of deployments and tens of thousands of customers, and unblocking millions of dollars in customer revenue through high-severity technical escalations. Deep expertise in Bicep, Terraform, and PowerShell automation, CI/CD pipeline engineering, and Well-Architected reliability practices. Proven technical lead driving complex enterprise customer engagements, executive-level advisory, and developer enablement across Microsoft's engineering and field organizations.
Highlights
Azure Landing Zones – Bicep Lead
Built and led the ALZ-Bicep framework from the ground up — architecting a modular platform of 19 Azure Verified Modules deployed 33,000+ times across 560+ enterprise customers and integrating zonal and multi-region resiliency by default; recognized as ALZ Lead and three-time Cloud Adoption Framework Evangelist.
Azure Verified Modules (AVM) - Bicep Lead
Built and own 14 Azure Verified Modules for Platform Landing Zones, and assisted with 10+ additional modules, collectively adopted across hundreds of thousands of deployments and tens of thousands of customers; recognized as Platinum Contributor (FY25 & FY26), Community Champion, and Bicep Coach.
Azure Proactive Resiliency Library & Reliability Engineering
Led architecture and development of the Azure Proactive Resiliency Library (APRL), scaling it into a company-wide customer offering delivered at scale as a fiscal-year priority; led Well-Architected Reliability Assessments (WARAs) and served as Directly Responsible Individual for Azure Monitoring, building a threat model and Disaster Recovery Plan approved by the BCDR team — recognized as Azure Resiliency Leader (Platinum).
Customer Engagements & Technical Escalation
Owned Microsoft-side resolution for a Fortune 100 customer's air-gapped GitHub Copilot application and database modernization, protecting a $600M data center exit; serve as the primary technical escalation point for Microsoft's field CSAs on high-severity, cross-technology issues, unblocking millions of dollars in customer revenue — including $1.3M, $300K ACR, and $120K ACR engagements — and delivered a first-of-its-kind Bicep Workshop Plus pilot that cut a customer's Bicep development timeline from years to months.
Secure Platform Engineering
Designed an enterprise code-signing pipeline for PowerShell modules and automated dependency/security gates (Dependabot, CodeQL, SAST) to raise OpenSSF Scorecard ratings; led modernization of the AKS Secure Baseline and App Service Landing Zones onto AVM and built reusable Factory publication infrastructure for modernization offerings.
Community & Field Enablement
Managed the 3,850-member ALZ-Bicep channel, present at community calls (90–120 attendees, 2,500+ views per video), and deliver Level-Up training sessions — recognized as FY26 LevelUp Luminary; mentor 25+ engineers and both senior and early-career CSAs on IaC, DevOps, CAF, and WAF best practices.
Certifications
- Microsoft Certified Azure Solutions Architect Expert
- Microsoft Certified Azure DevOps Engineer Expert
- Microsoft Certified Azure Security Engineer Associate
- Microsoft Certified Azure Network Engineer Associate
- Microsoft Certified Azure Administrator Associate
- HashiCorp Certified Terraform Associate (003)
- GitHub Copilot Certification
- Sitecore 9.0 Certified Platform Associate Developer
Interests
- Open-source software development and community contributions
- Mentoring engineers and developer enablement
- Distributed systems, developer tooling, and cloud-native architecture
- Motorcycles and Cars
- Plants and Gardening
- Gaming
Experience
Microsoft
Cloud Solution Architect – Tech Success (Apps and AI)
Oct 2025 – Jul 2026
Austin, TX
- Owned Microsoft-side resolution for a Fortune 100 customer's GitHub Copilot-powered application and database modernization in an air-gapped, regulated environment — protecting a $600M data center exit — coordinating Product Groups, GitHub engineering, and executive stakeholders.
- Unblocked a $1.3M opportunity for a major airline customer, escalated after a prior engagement stalled, coordinating across multiple product teams to drive resolution.
- Led modernization of the AKS Secure Baseline landing zone in Bicep, implementing Entra Workload Identity, Azure CNI Overlay with Cilium, Key Vault CSI Driver, and a reusable multi-cluster namespace pattern.
- Refactored the App Service Landing Zone onto AVM, updating App Service Plan, ASE, and Functions modules and building a new Managed Instance test case where none previously existed.
- Built reusable Factory publication infrastructure (playbooks, runbooks, CI/CD) for modernization offerings, reducing time-to-publish for new offerings.
- Served as Directly Responsible Individual (DRI) for Azure Monitoring (including the Azure Monitor Baseline Alerts framework), restoring product features to SLA, building a complete threat model, and delivering a Disaster Recovery Plan approved by the BCDR team; raised OpenSSF Scorecard security rating via Dependabot, CodeQL, SAST scanning, and hardened CI/CD runners.
- Partnered with Microsoft product groups to influence platform readiness (GitHub Copilot BYOK, App Modernization tooling) through scenario-based testing and cross-team collaboration.
- Sustained Azure Landing Zones (ALZ) and Azure Verified Modules (AVM) ownership — 10+ modules powering 435,000+ deployments across 8,400+ subscriptions — and executive-level customer advisory through a transition to engineering organization within Microsoft.
- Built Mulesoft-to-APIM and Apigee-to-APIM modernization offerings — Bicep/Terraform IaC aligned to the APIM Landing Zone Accelerator and AVM — reusing shared infrastructure across offerings to accelerate time-to-publish.
- Recognized as FY26 Value Acceleration IP Contributor (Silver) for reusable IP delivered through Factory and platform modernization offerings.
- Bicep
- AKS
- App Service
- API Management
- AVM
- Executive Communication
- Customer Escalation
- Monitoring
- Azure Government
- Automation
Cloud Solution Architect – Tech Strategy (Infra)
Oct 2022 – Oct 2025
Austin, TX
- Built and led the ALZ-Bicep AVM-based framework from the ground up, architecting a modular platform of 19 open-source modules deployed 33,000+ times across 560+ enterprise customers — owning architecture, code reviews, release engineering, and cross-team collaboration.
- Led architecture and development of the Azure Proactive Resiliency Library (APRL), incorporation of CI/CD pipelines, standardizing metadata schemas, and designing an enterprise code-signing pipeline for PowerShell modules using Microsoft certificates; helped scale APRL into a company-wide customer offering delivered at scale as a fiscal-year priority.
- Integrated zonal and multi-region resiliency support by default into the ALZ-Bicep Accelerator, enabling customers to deploy zone-redundant infrastructure without custom configuration.
- Led large-scale Azure migrations for enterprise and public-sector customers, including a $150M multi-application cloud migration for a county government and an AWS-to-Azure migration that enabled a financial institution's Terraform Enterprise adoption.
- Automated dependency, security, and quality gates (Dependabot, CodeQL, SAST, branch protection) across engineering repositories, raising OpenSSF Scorecard ratings.
- Served as the primary technical escalation point for Microsoft's field CSAs across high-severity, cross-technology customer issues, unblocking millions of dollars in customer revenue by rapidly resolving complex challenges spanning infrastructure, code, and architecture.
- Designed and built 14 Azure Verified Modules, and assisted with 10+ additional modules, collectively adopted across hundreds of thousands of deployments and tens of thousands of customers; recognized as Platinum Contributor, Community Champion, and Bicep Coach for sustained open-source contributions.
- Partnered with Microsoft product groups to influence platform features (RBAC deny assignments, ARM What-If operator, Deployment Stacks) through scenario-based testing and code contributions — closing a governance gap that could have led to over-privileged access at enterprise scale.
- Led Well-Architected Reliability Assessments and remediation engagements across enterprise and public-sector customers, driving adoption of resiliency patterns and earning consistently strong customer and leadership feedback.
- Drove developer community enablement; managed a 3,850-member Teams channel, presented at community calls (90–120 attendees, 2,500+ views), delivered training sessions, and mentored 25+ engineers on software engineering and DevOps best practices.
- Bicep
- Azure
- ALZ
- AVM
- IaC
- DevOps
- Terraform
- PowerShell
- Security
- Open Source
Customer Engineer
Apr 2021 – Oct 2022
Austin, TX
- Subject matter expert for IaC (Bicep and Terraform), Azure IaaS/PaaS, Azure WAF – Reliability, and CI/CD with Azure DevOps and GitHub Actions.
- Designed and implemented infrastructure solutions for customers, translating business requirements into scalable cloud architectures.
- Delivered reliability risk assessments, hands-on workshops, and custom engineering engagements for enterprise customers.
- Authored and shipped reusable engagement deliverables (MIPs) across multiple solution areas, accelerating customer onboarding.
- Awarded 'MSUS Learning Superhero' for leading team effort that unblocked an $8.3M Azure competitive win against AWS.
- Active member of team D&I group promoting Microsoft's mission to reduce inequalities, increase innovation, and accelerate organizational change.
- Bicep
- Terraform
- Azure
- DevOps
- Reliability
- GitHub Actions
RBA, Inc.
DevOps Engineer
Jun 2018 – Apr 2021
Wayzata, MN
- Led consulting engagements designing and building distributed applications and cloud-native services.
- Engineered CI/CD pipelines (Azure DevOps, Travis CI) for .NET, .NET Core, and Java applications, automating build, test, and deployment workflows.
- Architected high-availability, multi-region active-active environments with advanced release strategies (Blue-Green, canary).
- Containerized workloads with Docker and orchestrated deployments on Kubernetes (AKS, ECS); automated infrastructure provisioning with ARM and Terraform.
- Integrated static analysis (SonarQube), dynamic security scanning (OWASP ZAP), and dependency auditing (WhiteSource) into CI/CD pipelines.
- Instrumented applications with APM/observability tools (New Relic, AppDynamics, App Insights, LogicMonitor) to identify bottlenecks and drive performance improvements.
- Automated build, release, and environment provisioning workflows using PowerShell scripting.
- Mentored developers and client teams on agile practices, performance troubleshooting, and DevOps culture.
- Recognized with discretionary bonuses for consistently strong client and team feedback.
- Azure
- DevOps
- Docker
- Kubernetes
- Terraform
- CI/CD
- .NET
Support Engineer
Jun 2017 – Jun 2018
Wayzata, MN
- Engineered and managed multi-region, active-active Azure environments supporting mission-critical workloads across e-commerce, financial services, agriculture, and real estate industries.
- Developed PowerShell automation scripts for configuration management; maintained SQL Server environments (mirroring, replication, maintenance jobs).
- Debugged complex distributed systems, tracing production issues down to application code.
- Led migration of 20+ web applications and databases from Azure IaaS to PaaS, reducing customer infrastructure costs.
- Implemented observability solutions (Stackify, New Relic, SCOM) across Azure production environments.
- Azure
- PowerShell
- SQL Server
- Monitoring
IT Analyst
Jun 2016 – Jun 2017
Wayzata, MN
- Implemented TFS/Azure DevOps for CI/CD pipelines and upgraded internal TFS server.
- Managed SharePoint 2013–2016/Online, including 50+ site collections, migrations, workflows, and full farm upgrades.
- Automated patching, monitoring, and reporting workflows using Microsoft System Center (SCCM, SCOM, SCSM, Orchestrator).
- Supported 70+ production servers across Hyper-V clusters, colocation, and on-prem environments.
- Administered Office 365 tenant (Power BI, Dynamics CRM, O365 Admin/Security Center).
- Provided tier 1–3 technical support for 120+ employees.
- SharePoint
- System Center
- Hyper-V
- Office 365
- TFS
Medtronic
Information Technology Intern
Jun 2015 – Aug 2015
Plymouth, MN
- Monitored, logged, and escalated help desk tasks, ensuring proper prioritization.
- Created documentation for devices and software processes.
- Collaborated with tier III help desk, business analysts, and network engineers on projects.
- IT Support
- Documentation