About

Hamza Z. is a technology entrepreneur and programming enthusiast with a passion for building technology-based businesses globally. With over 12 years of experience in the industry, he has scaled high-performance teams across San Francisco, Zurich, Shanghai, and Hong Kong. Hamza has worked closely with the core Microsoft Azure team in Shanghai, where he helped improve their cloud platform and was recognized as an outstanding individual contributor. Over the past two years, he has been hard at work building GitStart, a Y Combinator-backed startup that helps engineering-focused companies be more agile, scale feature deployment faster, and reduce management complexity. Prior to GitStart, Hamza worked as a Staff Engineer at Rainforest QA, where he played a key role in the Rainforest 2.0 effort, which allowed customers to manage substantially larger test suits than previously possible. He also led the revamp of the tester portal into React, while enabling real-time support to stream results back. Hamza eventually left Rainforest to start GitStart, with heavy inspiration on how Rainforest manages over 50k QA engineers, but instead utilizes those techniques to manage junior developers at a massive scale. Hamza also founded Parle, a social platform layered on top of websites and PDFs. He wrote the initial prototype as a research project and turned it into a social platform layered on top of research PDFs from 0 to 50k users at peak. Hamza hired the founding team and secured the initial funding round, and also became the most engaging discussion platform for researchers and academics in Hong Kong. However, the local Hong Kong market was too small, and they could not break out into other markets, which eventually led him to shut down the company, but kept the product alive for existing users a few more years. Hamza holds a degree from Y Combinator, Stanford University, ETH Zürich, and The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in Computer Science. He has a strong technical background in QA, testing, Azure, infrastructure, and research science. Hamza is a forward-thinking entrepreneur with a proven track record of building successful businesses and scaling high-performance teams.