Adam Toris

Own the backend for every customer-facing Zola surface: two-sided vendor marketplace, invitations & paper, wedding websites, guest list, wedding and baby registry, budget tool, and seating charts — plus search. Split my time evenly between leading the team and shipping code, and partner with product and the other engineering leads on roadmap prioritization.

• Took ownership of the consolidated product engineering team when four teams merged into one, and kept the full customer-facing backend surface area shipping with a fraction of the previous headcount — by pushing decision-making down to the engineers, cutting process that wasn't earning its keep, and making AI-assisted development the default way the team works.
• Built and shipped production LLM features on AWS Bedrock (Claude): a customer-facing assistant that helps couples find vendors in the marketplace, an AI thank-you note writer that drafts from real guest context while keeping the couple's own voice, and an internal on-call bot that investigates alerts through MCP — with RAG, tool use, and guardrails throughout.
• Pitched and led a ground-up rewrite of the paper & stationery SKU system: rebuilt an opaque, inefficient caching layer, cut the code down substantially, and shipped internal tools that let the business manage the design catalog and set pricing without engineering. New paper features now take weeks instead of months, which unlocked square cards, posters, stickers, an asset library, and full design customization — and a step change in paper sales.
• Named engineering's AI "captain" by leadership: run trainings, coach engineers through better AI technique daily, and created Zola's internal AI skill library, which the team now contributes to. PR throughput, test coverage, review quality, and observability are all better than they have ever been.
• Own search end to end: migrated off a paid Fusion search platform onto OpenSearch, currently leading the CloudSearch consolidation onto it, and built tooling that lets the business tune relevance levers — synonyms, replacements, augmentations — without a deploy.

Led Core Engineering — wedding websites, guest list, seating chart, budget tool, pre-auth/SEO, and cross-sell — first as technical lead, then as manager.

• Grew and led a team of 8–9 engineers: hired about four of them, and promoted two engineers into engineering managers, then managed them as managers.
• Designed and led a complete rewrite of Zola's wedding website product — the most-used tool on the platform — modernizing the design and moving it to server-side rendering.
• Removed a hard external dependency in the process: theme creation had been outsourced with a multi-week lead time, and the rewrite replaced it with an internal tool that lets a Zola employee build a new theme in a few hours, with flexible layouts.

Backend engineering across Zola's planning and commerce products.

• Selected to design and build Zola's honeymoon product, connecting couples with Zola travel planners to build their trip; launched shortly before COVID closed that business.
• One of the first engineers on Zola's paper product — the same system I later pitched and rewrote as Director.
• Built out Zola's guest list tools, and led Zola's interns in building the seating chart tool.