NickSloan

What’s next?

For the first time since 2012 I’m looking for something new. I’m available now for my next full-time role, and I’m also taking on consulting clients through Sloates & Coan.

I’ve spent about twenty years building software products, usually early enough to shape both the architecture and the team around them. I’ve worked every part of the stack as an IC, as a technical co-founder, and as the person who built a team and its hiring process from nothing. I know TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, and Swift well, and I’ve picked up whatever else a problem called for. I’ve run dozens of AWS services in production, and I know how to keep the bill reasonable whether I’m serving hundreds of users or hundreds of thousands. I architect it, I build it, I run it in production, and I grow the team that keeps it running.

The greatest hits

I spent three years at Matter Neuroscience, where I was brought on to turn the science into a product. Two earlier prototypes had proven out the research, but neither was viable as something people would actually use. The concept was to build an app that would allow users to track their best memories, and resurface them. I was a part of early vision conversations, and when it became clear that the product would call for an iOS app I dove headfirst into Swift and SwiftUI. Within 90 days the initial design and algorithms were implemented and the concept was shipping via TestFlight. I built the first version of the app, and then I hired the engineering team that launched the app and secured a Series A round of $26 million. The app was also used in research studies at Mount Sinai and Maastricht University, supporting over a hundred participants in fMRI research. Privacy was built into the foundation of the product rather than bolted on as policy. I designed and built Hippo, an end-to-end encrypted storage service that kept keys on the user’s device, so the servers only ever held data the company couldn’t read. Tight SwiftUI integrations made it easy to use across the entire project.

Studioworks is a business management platform for creative studios: invoicing, contacts, and payments. As half of the engineering team, and a quarter of the entire company, I was involved in virtually everything. I led the development of invoices, clients, proposals, and studio branding, and I wrote the vast majority of the frontend. We built the product in Swift and Hummingbird so that whole classes of mistakes would fail to compile. Since launch it has had 100% uptime, requests usually land under 20ms, and cold-cached pages reach the user fully rendered in less than 100ms. The product runs on AWS and serves over a thousand studios and all of their clients for under $200 a month.

UpContent started as an internal tool at the content marketing agency where I was CTO, and grew into a content discovery and curation product. I built the first version and then spent six years leading it: architecting the crawler and search engine that indexed millions of pages, and building Hootsuite integrations that became a partnership still running more than a decade later. It spun out as its own company after a Series A, and I stayed on as co-founder and CTO through the transition.

Leading teams

At UpContent I went from being the sole engineer to leading a team of four developers and a designer. I set technical policy and direction, interviewed and hired candidates, and worked with them to build and refine their professional skills.

At Matter I grew the iOS team from one engineer to six. I championed an interview process based around conversations rather than quizzes that repeatedly delivered excellent candidates. I collaborated with the team to find opportunities for them to pursue their areas of expertise and explore new challenges.

As a manager, I’m best at clearing roadblocks so the people on my team can stay focused on doing their best work. I’ve also navigated performance issues, and every performance improvement plan I’ve run has been a two-way street. They’ve changed how I hire and mentor.

I also founded and ran the Pittsburgh Python User Group for six years.

Open source

When I hit a bug or a gap in something I depend on, I try to fix it upstream.

Consulting

Sloates & Coan is a two-person consultancy: me and Sean Coates, who I’ve been working with since we met at OmniTI in 2008. We build web and mobile software, and we have room for clients now. What you get is a couple of seasoned engineers with nearly two decades together, working directly with you.

WonderSwitcher is a VPN endpoint manager we built for WonderProxy and delivered to the App Store in about six weeks. I handled the OAuth2 implementation against their existing enterprise SSO, the client-side auth exchange, all of the design implementation, and a Live Activity that reminds you to turn the VPN off when you’re done.

We take on backend systems, iOS and macOS apps, infrastructure and deployment, integration and OAuth work, design implementation, and performance investigation.

Full-time roles

I’m looking at engineering leadership roles (Head of Engineering, VP of Engineering, CTO) and senior individual contributor roles (Staff, Principal, founding engineer). I’ve done both and I’m genuinely happy in either.

I want to work on hard problems where I can have real impact, a product I’d be proud to put my name on, clear goals, and great teammates. I’m open to any company stage and team size.

I work remotely, or locally from Pittsburgh.

Get in touch

Email me at inquiries@nicksloan.com and let me know whether it’s about a role or a project.

You can also find me on GitHub, Mastodon, and LinkedIn, or read my blog.