Leadership Team

Founder-led. Engineering-first.

Thazen is led by its co-founders, who stay close to the programs we support and the engineers who deliver them.

Meet the Founders

Thad Horning, CEO, Partner & Co-Founder, Thazen

Thad Horning

CEO, Partner & Co-Founder

Thad co-founded Thazen in 2017 and, as CEO, leads the company’s strategy and growth, its customer and program relationships, and its partnerships across DoW, federal civilian and commercial programs, including the Enactic Labs joint venture. He guides Thazen’s business development and capture and keeps the company close to the programs it supports. A U.S. Army veteran and former non-commissioned officer, Thad holds an Executive MBA from Penn State University and a B.S. from Mansfield University of Pennsylvania.

Areas of Expertise

  • Company Strategy & Growth
  • Partnerships
  • Customer Relationships
  • Business Development & Capture
Zenon Rawley, CTO, Partner & Co-Founder, Thazen

Zenon Rawley

CTO, Partner & Co-Founder

Zenon co-founded Thazen and, as CTO, leads its engineering and technology strategy, architecture and delivery across AI & software engineering, cloud and platform engineering, DevSecOps and site reliability, and data streaming, including the engineering behind Topsoil, the private coding agent Thazen built. He sets the engineering standards our program-embedded engineers work by, from test-driven, reviewable delivery to AI-assisted workflows where a person still reviews every change. Zenon holds a B.S. in Management Information Systems and Computer Science from Florida State University.

Areas of Expertise

  • Technology Strategy & Architecture
  • AI & Software Engineering
  • Cloud & Platform Engineering
  • DevSecOps & SRE
  • Data Streaming

Engineering Bench

Senior Engineers, by Default

A sample of the senior engineers who staff our programs.

Senior AI & Software Engineer

Agentic AI, RAG and LLM applications deployed in environments the program controls, built with test-driven, reviewable delivery in Java, Python and modern web stacks.

Senior Cloud & Platform Engineer

AWS, AWS GovCloud (US) and Azure platforms, Kubernetes on EKS and OpenShift, and infrastructure as code with Terraform and Ansible.

Senior DevSecOps & Site Reliability Engineer

Secure CI/CD with integrated code and dependency scanning, STIG-aligned hardening, policy as code, plus observability, incident response and service-level objectives.

Senior Data & MLOps Engineer

Kafka and event-driven data streaming, analytics pipelines, Grafana/Prometheus observability, and MLOps with Amazon SageMaker and Amazon Bedrock.

Certifications Across the Team

  • AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional
  • Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert
  • Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA)
  • HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate
  • CompTIA Security+
  • Certified SAFe Release Train Engineer
  • Certified ScrumMaster
  • ITIL

Want to Work With This Team?

Bring us your program, or come build with us.

Let’s Build Together Careers at Thazen