Zeke LaresZeke Lares
Head of Software Engineering · Butlr

Zeke Lares

I build the systems that turn the physical world into data — at scale, securely, and increasingly with AI in the loop. Fifteen years from first commit to running all of engineering.

See the work The cancer research project Read the blog
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00 At a glance
0+ Years shipping production software from BI reports to global IoT fleets
0 Orders of magnitude of API growth led at Butlr since 2022
0 Open source systems projects all Rust, all built in the open
0 Book on AI driven cancer research free to read, always
01 About

I'm Ezequiel "Zeke" Lares, Head of Software Engineering at Butlr, where I lead backend, IoT, and infrastructure. I set technical direction for the org while staying close enough to the code to be dangerous.

My path runs from being the first corporate developer at an engineering firm to scaling an API by several orders of magnitude. Along the way: secure VPN backends at Norton, spatial data ontologies at Mapped, and a sensing platform at Butlr that understands buildings without ever pointing a camera at anyone.

A lot of my work lives where engineering meets AI: putting LLMs into real production paths, not demos. Off the clock, I run an open source cancer research project and wrote a book about it.

02 Career

Fifteen years of shipping backends that have to stay up.

From BI reports and internal tooling to global IoT fleets and APIs at internet scale: each role one step deeper into systems and leadership.

2022 to present Butlr Head of Software Engineering
I lead engineering across backend, IoT, and infrastructure, and still spend most of my time building.
Scaled API traffic by several orders of magnitude while growing the fleet to tens of thousands of continuously streaming sensors.
Cut monthly cloud spend nearly in half even as the fleet kept growing.
Defined the company's data model: the canonical definitions and boundaries for customers, sites, buildings, rooms, zones, and sensors.
Led the major migrations end to end: moving the core datastore, overhauling and eventually replacing the device messaging layer, and bringing the entire time series history in house.
Handle the engineering side of security and compliance.
2021 to 2022 Mapped Senior Software Engineer
Led the IoT Connector work: extracting, normalizing, and integrating third party IoT device data into Mapped's unified building data API.
Designed the IoT Brick ontology for spatial, teleconference, and weather sensors, backed by an internal graph database.
Built and maintained core backend services for reliability and scalability.
2021 PriceSpider Software Engineer III
Backend engineer on WhereToBuy, the company's core product, while the team moved its Kubernetes cluster to AWS.
Ramped up quickly on a large production codebase and shipped updates across the backend services.
2019 to 2021 NortonLifeLock Principal Software Engineer
Helped architect the OAuth2 and JWT authentication layer for Norton's new secure, serverless VPN backend.
Found vulnerabilities on the SurfEasy site and worked on closing GDPR and PCI compliance gaps in payment processing.
Trimmed the AWS footprint, cutting overprovisioned resources and meaningfully lowering the monthly bill.
2018 to 2019 CU Direct Principal Software Engineer
Part of the Loan Origination System team, the platform behind auto lending for credit unions, and led its modernization effort.
Put development practices in place across the team: code coverage metrics, automation standards, and consistent delivery processes.
2016 to 2018 Symantec Senior Software Engineer
Started a companywide cloud aggregator service, a graph database fronted by GraphQL, to pull Norton's scattered backend systems into one queryable layer.
One of a handful of engineers on a small team taking on problems across the company, like integrating LifeLock into the Norton ecosystem.
Spent a year as interim product owner and built the customer screens for activation, upgrades, and renewals.
2013 to 2016 Moffatt & Nichol Senior Software Engineer
First corporate developer: established source control, documentation, deployment testing, the data warehouse, and web architecture.
Lead architect and developer for the internal site automating job, proposal, strategic initiative, and pursuit evaluation requests, serving 600+ users across 5 countries.
Automated daily exchange rates for 165 currencies, saving 400+ hrs/yr.
2011 to 2013 HMC Architects Software Engineer
Reverse engineered the firm's financial Income Statement, saving $10k+ and two months of development.
Lead developer for ReportGen, an automated report generator distributing SSRS reports by email and to SharePoint.
Lead BI developer for the firm's CRM report tracking performance, scheduling, and estimated at completion profit, reshaping how projects were planned.
2009 to 2011 County of Humboldt IT Application Analyst
First industry role: supported and built internal applications for county departments while finishing a CS degree at Humboldt.
03 Independent research
Open source · AI driven Cancer Therapy Mechanisms & Evidence
A Cross-Literature SynthesisE. Lares

I spent my nights using AI to help me read cancer research.

A census of the cancer literature in PubMed that uses the National Library of Medicine's own subject headings, not labels of my own, to map where cancer therapy research is concentrated and which ideas deserve a closer look. On top of it, Monte Carlo and spatial simulations test specific claims across ten treatments. Open source and free forever.

5.2M
census records
16
topics counted
10
simulated treatments
335
pages, free

A simulation library written in Rust with Python bindings (MIT licensed). The simulations bound the conditions under which a hypothesis could hold. They're computational predictions, not clinical evidence. The book is a free PDF on GitHub, and it always will be.

View on GitHub Explore the atlas Read the latest update

What the census shows

From the project's atlas snapshot of September 21, 2026 and the book's own corrections. Hover, tap, or use the arrow keys on a chart for details, or open any table.

About one in a thousand

Each blue square is about 5,200 of the 5,187,265 census records. The whole June corpus, 4,830 papers, would fill about 93% of one square: the gray one in the corner.
View as table: About one in a thousand
CollectionRecords
June keyword corpus4,830
Census of PubMed cancer literature5,187,265
June corpus as a share of the census0.093%
One square in the gridabout 5,200

Three headlines that changed

Checked again, each number fell, and each correction is in the book.
View as table: Three headlines that changed
FigureEarlierCurrent
Immunotherapy share2,297 of the 4,830 papers my June keyword searches pulled; then 31,890 of 165,700 census topic labels47.6%19.2%
Empty topic by site cells94 of 418 cells (19 topics by 22 sites); then 6 of 288 cells (16 topics by 18 sites)22.5%2.1%
Sonodynamic trial share114 trials in 2,513 papers under a broad ultrasound heading; then 4 trials among the papers that name sonodynamic therapy4.54%0.29%

Where the attention goes

Census records for each of the 16 research topics the census can count by subject heading. Immunotherapy, 47.6% of the June corpus, ranks third here, behind two headings that mostly count a process (DNA methylation) and a material (nanoparticles). Counts measure attention, not importance or efficacy, and chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery aren't among these topics.
View as table: Where the attention goes
Research topicCensus recordsClinical trialsTrial shareGrowth, 2015 to 2025
Epigenetic processes and therapiesAlso counts basic DNA methylation biology, not only treatments.41,2781,3073.17%0.9x from 2015 to 2025
Nanoparticles36,7881820.49%2.5x from 2015 to 2025
Immunotherapy31,8901,4304.48%11.6x from 2015 to 2025
CAR T cell and adoptive therapyIncludes adoptive cell therapies beyond CAR T cells.15,3581,0206.64%6.9x from 2015 to 2025
Metabolic targeting8,809450.51%2.2x from 2015 to 2025
Antibody drug conjugates6,0195809.64%3.1x from 2015 to 2025
Synthetic lethality5,4373426.29%4.2x from 2015 to 2025
Oncolytic viruses5,0062014.02%1.2x from 2015 to 2025
CRISPR gene editing3,67460.16%8.1x from 2015 to 2025
Bispecific antibodies3,4623269.42%5.5x from 2015 to 2025
Electrochemical therapy2,5151425.65%0.8x from 2015 to 2025
Therapeutic ultrasound (broad heading)A broad ultrasound heading, not sonodynamic therapy alone.2,5131144.54%5.3x from 2015 to 2025
High intensity focused ultrasound1,352967.10%1.2x from 2015 to 2025
Phagocytosis checkpoints918131.42%4.1x from 2015 to 2025
Microbiome380123.16%only 8 papers in 2015, too few to measure growth
mRNA vaccinesA lower bound: the subject headings used here miss some mRNA vaccine work.30120.66%no papers under this heading in 2015

Source: atlas data at commit e9ec92c0 and the free book. Explore the census data in the research atlas.

04 Open source

A systems lab, built in the open.

Foundational infrastructure written from scratch in Rust — durable, crash-safe, and frugal by design. Each project uses AI to mine prior art and adversarially verify every load-bearing claim before trusting it.

IronBus

A durable, crash-safe message queue for the edge — in one static Rust binary.

One ordered queue that survives power loss and self-heals against corrupt files with bounded, reported loss. SQS-style visibility leases, group-commit fdatasync durability, and zero-copy fan-out — drops onto a Raspberry Pi with no JVM and no dependencies. Verified with deterministic crash-injection simulation.

RustEdge / IoTDurabilitymusl static
Early implementation · CI-gated PRs
IronCache

The most efficient Redis-compatible cache — in one static Rust binary.

A shared-nothing, thread-per-core engine that speaks RESP2/RESP3 and keeps the Redis contract — built for maximal throughput per core and minimal memory per item. Borrows the best from Dragonfly, Valkey, and the modern eviction literature (W-TinyLFU, S3-FIFO, SIEVE), with forkless snapshots.

RustRedis-compatibleThread-per-coreio_uring
Spec & first engine slice
IronAuth

A modern, standards first OpenID Connect identity platform.

Multi tenant, multi environment, EdDSA first, built toward a certified OIDC core with the conformance suite wired into CI as a merge gate. One repository holds the provider server, management APIs, SDKs, admin SPA, and hosted auth pages. Single static binary on PostgreSQL.

RustOIDC / OAuthIdentityEdDSA
Foundations in progress
IronTraffic

A traffic and API manager in one Rust binary.

An L4 and L7 load balancer, reverse proxy, API gateway, and Kubernetes ingress controller in a single binary, with a dashboard that can actually change things. Zero downtime for both configuration and binary swaps: atomic snapshot apply plus descriptor handoff, connections preserved across each.

RustLoad balancingAPI gatewayIngress
Foundational development
cancer_research

Open source, AI driven cancer therapy research, and the engine behind the free book.

A census of 5.2 million PubMed cancer records plus a Monte Carlo and spatial simulation library (MIT licensed Rust, with Python bindings) that tests which mechanistic claims could hold across ten treatments. Every correction stays in the history, and all of it is free.

RustPythonSimulationOpen science
Active · book free to read
05 Recognition
iF Design Award · Winner Product Design · Building Technology 2025

Butlr AI Platform for Private Spatial Intelligence: anonymous people sensing that uses body heat and AI to understand presence, movement, and occupancy without ever capturing an identity.

Won by the Butlr platform, where I lead engineering. See the winner listing.

Cal Poly Humboldt · NOW Research feature Jul 2008

I'm really used to working by myself. Now, working with a partner, listening to his ideas — it's more creative and stimulates my ideas, too.

— Zeke, featured as an undergraduate researcher in "Computer Design A Big Hit", on the NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates program.

Research abstract: Spring 2009 ECS abstract booklet (PDF)

06 Writing

Notes from the engineering trenches.

Scaling stories, AI in production, and the occasional detour into open science.

OPEN SCIENCE12 min
No End Goal

My wife asked me what the end goal is for my open source cancer research project. There isn't one. Here's why I'm going to keep going anyway.

Read
JOURNEY9 min
Four Years at Butlr: A Journey in Commits

A dozen people and about a hundred sensors when I joined. Thousands of sensors around the world today. The road between, as my commit history remembers it.

Read
AI9 min
Putting AI in the Critical Path

Shipping LLMs into real production systems — not demos. What it took to trust a model enough to put it on the hot path.

Read
All writing

Let's build something that scales.

Open to conversations about engineering leadership, AI in production, and the cancer research project. The fastest way to reach me is email.

ezequiel.lares@outlook.com LinkedIn GitHub