Zach Moas | CTO at Daily's

2026 – now

Daily's

Own robotics and engineering: a teleoperated bimanual arm cell built to work a real production kitchen rather than a demo table.
Built the motion layer under it, turntable, elevator, and arm, behind a real-time control service with the operator UI that drives it.
Built the kitchen production system: the day plan, the station queues the line runs off, and an inventory ledger that balances to the gram.
Set the engineering direction and the standards the codebase is held to.

Jun – Aug 2025

Innova Engineered Plastics, Inc.

Created a CMM inspection SOP with embedded GD&T checks to standardize quality evaluations.
Designed and rolled out a manufacturable process for an advanced aerospace component, balancing specification against production reality.
Researched and specified polymer materials and manufacturing processes for customer use cases, recommending options on performance, environment, and cost.

May 2024 – May 2025

Applied Research Associates, Inc.

Prototyped and validated UAV electro-mechanical mechanisms using CAD and rapid fabrication.
Integrated sensors, microcontrollers, and RF transmission modules into cohesive subsystems.
Modeled system behavior in MATLAB and applied FEA to guide design choices.
Designed and fabricated electronics enclosures for UAV deployment.

Apr 2024 – May 2025

Competitive Robotics Organization at Virginia Tech

Led the team to first place and the Honda Innovation Award in the National Robotics Challenge, Manufacturing Workcell category.
Designed and iterated a 1.5 x 1 m vertical Cartesian gantry for automated print handling.
Engineered a pick-and-place mechanism for print plate manipulation.
Developed shelving and storage with integrated sensors for plate indexing, which is what made the workflow autonomous.
Created and managed the engineering design plan and delegated tasks across a 15 person team.

May – Aug 2023

Applied Research Associates, Inc.

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 to satisfy manufacturing and sourcing constraints.

Jan 2023 – Apr 2024