About

Nick Harris is a highly accomplished technology leader with over 15 years of experience in the field of Cyber Security. He currently serves as the Head of Engineering at Inception Health, where he plays a pivotal role in shaping the company's technical strategy and fostering engineering excellence.

During his illustrious career, Nick spent a decade at the prestigious National Security Agency, where he made significant contributions to the field of Cyber Operations. His work involved harnessing cutting-edge technology to accelerate operations, designing high-throughput data flows, and constructing a comprehensive knowledge base to defend the nation against foreign threats. His dedication and expertise led to numerous successful cybersecurity operations for high-value national security targets, earning him accolades, and a trip to Capitol Hill to brief the Congressional Intelligence Committee.

Nick's leadership skills shine through in his ability to lead engineering teams of various sizes, both on greenfield and legacy systems. He has a passion for staying abreast of technology trends and advocating engineering best practices that empower teams to deliver value to the business efficiently.

Educated at renowned institutions, Nick earned his Master's of Science in Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University and his Bachelor's of Science in Computer Science at Texas A&M University. His educational background, combined with his extensive hands-on experience, makes him a formidable force in the world of technology.

Beyond his professional pursuits, Nick is a multifaceted individual with a love for adventure. He enjoys traveling, rock climbing, indulging in gaming, expressing his musical talents, and cherishing quality time with his twin daughters.

EXPERIENCE

Inception Health — Head of Engineering

May 2021 - PRESENT

Founding engineering responsible for growing the engineering organization and building out the technical architecture to establish engineering excellence. 40% coding 60% leadership. Closely collaborated with the CTO and CEO to build a go-to-market strategy.

Pioneered product/engineering processes, grew product-engineering organization from 0 to 25, built CI/CD system for daily AWS prod deployments and fortnightly Mobile releases, established monitoring and alerting systems, developed & maintained OSS OpenTelemetry GitHub Action (23 users, 44 stars) and established DORA engineering excellence reporting metrics.

Established a stable product engineering organization from the ground up capable of daily prod deployments with modern technology with a Product go-to-market strategy for Hospital unfamiliar with startup product development practices and constrained with HIPAA regulations.

Tech Stack: AWS Serverless, Typescript, React-Native/React-Web, AWS Lake Formation, Apache Airflow, GitHub Actions, OpenTelemetry (Honeycomb)

CyberGRX — Principal Software Engineer

May 2019 - May 2021

Provided technical direction to 24 engineers across 4 cross-functional teams for a Python microservice architecture on Kubernetes, and provided feasibility assessments and technical guidance for Product Roadmap planning.

Redesigned the backend microservice codebase using Domain Driven Design (DDD) principles and implemented a performant Python ASGI server, Starlette (FastAPI’s core), eliminating concurrency deadlocks, leading to a 75% reduction in resource consumption. Established Event-Driven Architecture to dismantle the anti-pattern of a shared DB across microservices. Introduced, Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) workflows using Kubernetes Argo Workflows for microservice data syncing.

Revamped and scaled the microservice architecture to accommodate the rapid growth of the startup. This transformation resulted in improved developer efficiency, significant resource savings, and enhanced scalability while fostering collaboration and innovation through transparent architectural discussions.

Tech Stack: Kubernetes, Python ASGI Starlette (FastAPI core), React, Typescript, AWS, GitHub Actions, Neo4j, Postgres, ArgoCD, ArgoWorkflows, GraphQL

CyberGRX — Backend Lead Software Engineer

September 2018 - May 2019

Backend Lead for a team of 7. Provided feasibility assessments and technical guidance for Product Roadmap planning and cross-department strategy.

Designed a GraphQL API for a Data-Driven UI questionnaire backed by a custom content management system for cyber risk assessments. This was critical in enabling the business to streamline changes to the core product offering, risk assessments. Reduced change cycles lengths by 90%.

Won the company hackathon for a novel, performant, integration of Elasticsearch with Neo4j graph database, enhancing the speed and accuracy of searching across the exchange network.

Tech Stack: Kubernetes, Python, React, Typescript, AWS, Jenkins, Neo4j, Postgres, GraphQL, ElasticSearch

CyberGRX — Sr. Software Engineer

December 2017 - September 2018

Migrated legacy Django, REST, and Postgres monolith application into a microservice platform that uses GraphQL, Neo4j and Python aiohttp. Leveraged past experiences with graph databases to translate relational schemas into performant graph models that resulted in a 3x performance boost. Lead the team in best practices for GraphQL schema designs.

Designed and Developed a Data-Driven UI Admin tool using React and Apollo GraphQL for the operations team to manage customer data across our GraphQL Federation of microservices. This was critical in migrating off of Django Admin UI for our transition from monolith to microservices without disrupting business workflows. This deferred building an internal product by 2 years saving ~$2M.

Implemented a Change Event message bus using RabbitMQ for streaming Neo4j state change events to a microservices architecture.

Tech Stack: Kubernetes, Python, React, Typescript, AWS, Jenkins, Neo4j, Postgres, GraphQL, Django

National Security Agency — Lead Software Engineer

January 2007 - November 2017

Various roles across departments. As a Lead Data Architect, responsible for technical dataflow direction for over 100 engineers, establishing standardized pipelines and led the re-architecture of dataflow as a platform for developers. As a Team Lead, led 10 developers on a full-stack Java EE product automating Computer Network Operations. As a developer, built a novel knowledge base using Graph database technology for analyzing deeply connected high-value targets.

Many successful cybersecurity operations for high-value national security targets. Presented to the Congressional Intelligence Committee on Capitol Hill, received NSA Directors coin from 4-star General Keith Alexander, and special service award for Counter-Terrorist joint task force.

Tech Stack: Java EE, JSF, JNI, Wildfly, MongoDB, React|Redux, Angular, Javascript, Python, Django, ArangoDB, GraphQL, Docker