Zach Lyon
Design Engineer · Product Designer · Design Technologist
- mail@zachlyon.com
- zachlyon.com
- linkedin.com/in/zachlyoncreative
- Williamsport, PA
Summary
Design engineer with nearly three decades of turning complex problems into products people use. I've worked every stage of a product's life: research, brand, interface, code, launch and the business behind it, from founding and selling a SaaS company to building NASA-funded citizen-science platforms. That range makes me a better teammate: I design for the user, the engineer and the metric at once, and I prototype in working code with AI agents. Native and web apps, dashboards, maps and data pipelines, accessible by default. Looking for a hands-on, senior individual-contributor role on a product team.
Experience
Amoeba Media, LLC
2026–Present- Designed and shipped Trail Sherpa, an offline-first trail navigation app for the Pennsylvania Wilds, on iOS, Android and the web in five months, directing AI coding agents across 84% of commits.
- Set the success metric with the PA Wilds Center (itineraries planned per trail) and designed the admin dashboard that tracks it for grant reporting.
- Public outreach more than doubled sign-ups: 136 hikers have planned 50 itineraries and posted 122 trail condition reports.
- Built GIS data pipelines (OpenStreetMap, USGS elevation) that cut trail mileage error from 8% to 3%.
- Modernized EvAAL Tools: a WordPress site and PHP app rebuilt as one accessible SvelteKit app (Lighthouse accessibility 82 → 100), handed off to the client to run with Claude Code.
Zach Lyon Creative, Inc.
2003–2026- Led brand, web and app projects for Diamond Peak Ski Resort, Peppermill Resort, RSCVA, the City of South Lake Tahoe, Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival and Microsoft Licensing.
- Ran the business end to end: sales, budgets, project management, design and front-end development.
Hive Science
2017–2024- Designed Citizen Science Tahoe and Mountain Rain or Snow with UC Davis TERC, Keep Tahoe Blue, Desert Research Institute, Lynker and UNR, partly funded by NASA ROSES Earth Science.
- Designed a dynamic survey builder with survey locking and annual versioning; volunteers logged about 25,000 observations.
Joinify Visitor Guides
2014–2020- Built white-label apps with Bluetooth-beacon walking tours and QR merchant deals for Visit Virginia City, Sierra State Parks Foundation, the Cities of Sparks and Hastings, Nebraska City and Better Spaces NYC.
- Destinations updated content in real time, with no app store releases.
Minute7, Inc.
2007–2014- Grew from an in-house tool to $25K in monthly revenue; added 1,000+ customers in a single quarter and about 100 a month after.
- Featured in Entrepreneur Magazine (December 2010). Sold to my business partner in 2014.
Earlier (1998–2003): design roles at Twelve Horses, Rose/Glenn Advertising and Lexicon Visual Marketing in Reno, and Barash Group in State College, PA.
Skills
- Define
- Research & discovery · Stakeholder workshops · Requirements & strategy · AI agents & Claude Code
- Design
- Product & UX design · UI & design systems · Prototyping & usability testing · Brand & Adobe Creative Suite
- Develop
- TypeScript, HTML & CSS · Svelte / SvelteKit, React, Vue · Ionic & Capacitor (iOS/Android) · MapLibre, PostGIS & GIS data
- Deploy
- Cloudflare, Supabase, Firebase · Turborepo, Git, GitHub Actions · Performance, SEO & WCAG · Automation & LLM pipelines
Education
B.S. Graphic Design · Penn State · Pennsylvania College of Technology
1998Associate of Applied Arts, Advertising Art · Penn State · Pennsylvania College of Technology
1996