CTO at Daily's

Zach Moas.

See the work →
--:--:-- / San Francisco, CA
01 / About

Hands on, start to finish

I'm a hands-on Robotics Engineer with experience in autonomous systems, mechatronics, and CAD, currently the CTO of Daily's. I have a proven ability to lead technical teams, taking complex robotic systems from initial concept through design, prototyping, and successful deployment in competitive and research environments.

  • San Francisco, CA
  • B.S. Robotics & Mechatronics, Virginia Tech, 2025
02 / Experience

Where I have built things

2026 – now

Chief Technology Officer

Daily's
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  • Own robotics and engineering: a teleoperated bimanual arm cell built to work a real production kitchen.
  • Built the motion layer under it, turntable, elevator, and arm, behind a real-time control service and its operator UI.
  • Built the kitchen production system: the day plan, the station queues, and an inventory ledger that balances to the gram.
  • Set the engineering direction and the standards the codebase is held to.
Jun – Aug 2025

Engineering Intern

Innova Engineered Plastics, Inc.
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  • Created a CMM inspection SOP with embedded GD&T checks to standardize quality evaluations.
  • Designed a manufacturable process for an advanced aerospace component.
  • Researched and specified polymer materials and processes for customer use cases.
May 2024 – May 2025

Robotics Engineering Intern

Applied Research Associates, Inc.
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  • Prototyped and validated UAV electro-mechanical mechanisms.
  • Integrated sensors, microcontrollers, and RF modules into working subsystems.
  • Modeled system behavior in MATLAB and used FEA to guide design choices.
  • Designed and fabricated electronics enclosures for UAV deployment.
Apr 2024 – May 2025

Chief Engineer

Competitive Robotics Organization at Virginia Tech
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  • Led the team to first place and the Honda Innovation Award at the National Robotics Challenge.
  • Designed a 1.5 x 1 m vertical Cartesian gantry for automated print handling.
  • Engineered a pick-and-place mechanism for print plate manipulation.
  • Developed sensored shelving for plate indexing, which is what made the workflow autonomous.
  • Ran the design plan and task delegation across a 15 person team.
May – Aug 2023

Mechanical Engineering Intern

Applied Research Associates, Inc.
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  • Supported full lifecycle prototyping for defense applications.
  • Modeled and fabricated components for hydraulic and electrically actuated systems.
  • Used FEA to verify designs under expected load conditions.
  • Designed assemblies around manufacturing and sourcing constraints.
Jan 2023 – Apr 2024

Mechanical Lead

Competitive Robotics Organization at Virginia Tech
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  • Designed, built, and tested object handling and locomotion mechanisms.
  • Integrated mechanical subsystems and led the test setups that validated them.
  • Contributed to the highest scoring run out of 35 schools at IEEE SoutheastCon.
03 / Projects

Things I built outside a job

National Robotics Challenge workcell
2024 – 2025

National Robotics Challenge

An automated 3D print farm. Two Voron printers and a gantry that swaps its own plates.

Gold + Honda Innovation View project →
IEEE SoutheastCon robot
2023 – 2024

IEEE SoutheastCon

An autonomous competition robot inside a 12 inch cube, bridge and all.

1st, Hardware Design View project →
Mesa based LinuxCNC electronics
2024 – 2025

Micron Precision Printer

Senior capstone. A research grade printer on Mesa and LinuxCNC, targeting one micron.

View project →
RoboLeague hackathon car
2024

RoboLeague

Rocket League with real cars. A custom ESP32 RC car and an iOS app, built in 30 hours.

View project →
5 DOF robotic arm CAD
Ongoing

5 DOF Robotic Arm

A 3D printed arm as a test bench for kinematics and motion planning. Still in CAD.

View project →
Reinforcement learning experiment
2021

Reinforcement Learning

Does a location based intrinsic reward speed up convergence? It did.

View project →
04 / Awards

On the shelf