Zachary Neumann

Founded and ran QK's GIS practice end-to-end — the senior technical lead and department manager who built the function from scratch and scaled it into a 35–40 user organization serving a statewide municipal-GIS client book. Owned everything: platform, data, team, client delivery, tooling, and business development.

• Built and scaled the department from zero to ~35–40 GIS users, across QK staff and the users I administered on behalf of our contract cities. Owned hiring, onboarding, project intake, work distribution, SOP authoring, and senior review across all deliverables.
• Ran GIS as a managed service for 5 major California contract cities — Delano, Lemoore, Chowchilla, Selma, and Coalinga — plus a long tail of smaller municipalities. Closed Coalinga personally as a $50K/year managed-GIS contract.
• Administrated ArcGIS Online and Portal for the entire firm and every contract city — users, groups, content governance, licensing, sharing policy, inter-org data access.
• Owned the firm's entire GIS data estate. Built relationships with multiple California county GIS offices to source authoritative Parcels, Boundaries, General Plan, Land Use, zoning, and every other layer our planners and engineers relied on — tracked provenance, update cadence, and metadata so every map we shipped could be trusted.
• “Rapid Mapper.” Rebuilt QK's flagship internal automation as an ArcGIS Pro Task + Python workflow that produces 20 standardized report maps from a single project boundary — turning multi-hour manual map assembly into a one-click step.
• Agricultural Land Conversion analysis tool. Built an automated workflow modeled on American Farmland Trust's Farms Under Threat methodology — quantifies shifts from agricultural land into urban, industrial, and low-density residential use.
• CalGEM well-permitting map automation (Kern County). Automated the full map production pipeline for well-approval packages — identifying buildings, access roads, well pads, and adjacent features — taking a bulk-production job from manual end-to-end down to a single run.
• Municipal address management system. Built a GIS application for contract cities with N/S and E/W address grids and address-number lines; city planners drop as-builts, draw new development areas, and assign compliant addresses directly in-map.
• City engineering as-built + project-boundary platform. Built a system for contract city engineers to draw project boundaries and upload as-builts to Azure; Python scripts automatically link uploaded as-builts to the correct project boundary.
• Firm-wide platform migration from ArcMap to ArcGIS Pro. Authored the migration plan, delivered training seminars across departments, wrote the SOPs, and made ArcGIS Pro the new baseline.
• AI-augmented GIS — WSL ↔ ArcGIS Pro bridge. Built a WSL-based bridge that lets Claude Code (running in Linux) communicate with and operate ArcGIS Pro on Windows — driving the full ArcGIS Pro application from an LLM agent. Early, practical integration of agentic AI into the production GIS stack.
• Trusted GIS advisor to QK's biology, planning, engineering, and survey departments — producing the maps and spatial analyses that went into CEQA / NEPA documents, planning reports, well-permitting packages, survey deliverables, and client products.

Senior technical lead for the Forest Service's public-participation GIS program — the system the agency uses to collect public comment on NEPA projects, land-use plans, and recreation fee proposals.

• Owned the full project lifecycle for Enterprise Program engagements: strategic prospecting, client needs assessment, proposal authoring, budgeting, and delivery across regions and individual National Forests.
• Modernized NEPA public scoping agency-wide by automating deployment of Public Participatory GIS web applications (TPCM, RFCM) using Python, the ArcGIS API for Python, ArcGIS Pro, and ArcGIS Online.
• Cut deployment time from 80 hours to 15 minutes by automating 50 TPCM and 30 RFCM project rollouts.
• Centralized 7,000+ public NEPA comments into a single geodatabase, giving planners across the agency unified access to public input on land-use decisions.
• Built the CARA integration — connected TPCM with the agency's Comment and Analysis Response Application using FME and Python.
• Automated Recreation Site Fee Proposal signage using Acrobat + the JavaScript API.
• Built a location-based market-intelligence tool on 5 years of recreation fee sales data to guide placement of automatic fee machines, augmented with web-scraped Recreation.gov, Good Sam, and National Park pricing data.
• Automated QR-code generation for the National Visitor Use Monitoring Program (thousands of sites) — reduced a 2–3 week manual workload to a few days. Highlighted in the official USFS Enterprise Program reference letter, 12/2021.
• Evangelized the platform. Presented TPCM technical architecture at the Public Participatory GIS Conference at Cal Poly; lightning talks at the 2017 Esri User Conference (San Diego).

• Point-person between government and private-sector stakeholders (City of Portland, State of Oregon) and Hack Oregon's data team.
• Built APIs and a sandbox web application presenting data-driven studies across partner organizations; presented results at a 500-person public event.
• Documented dataset inventory and verified data quality to unblock data scientist and database engineer workflows.