Zach Goins is a Senior Autonomy Software Engineer at Scythe Robotics, a leading developer of outdoor mobile robots, including an autonomous commercial lawnmower. Coming from the non-traditional background of business school at the University of Florida with a side hustle as a musician, Goins stumbled into engineering through an unexpected encounter with model planes that sparked an insatiable interest in machines and programming.
He found his way to the Machine Intelligence Lab at the university and, rather than restarting college to get an engineering degree, learned everything he could about robotics through direct hands-on experience and experimentation. Goins then began his career as a Software Engineer at a 3D mapping + SLAM startup, where he met two of the future founders of Scythe Robotics. Itching to get back into robotics after leveling up his programming chops in that role, he joined Scythe as the first full-time, non-founder software engineer.