Nickolas Means Email & Phone Number

Austin, TX, US

Managing Up is a podcast about leading and managing in the world of technology. With a format akin to a peer mentoring session, the hosts spend an hour digging into topics ranging from building trust, to holding 1:1s, to understanding the various roles in technology leadership.

Boston, MA, US

• Collaborated with product partner to rebuild product engineering process from ground up, replacing daily just-in-time founder-driven tasking with a flexible project pipeline, engineer-led feature briefs for each.
• Stabilized fragile application by migrating production infrastructure from a complex Kubernetes-based platform the team lacked expertise in operating to a much simpler Amazon ECS stack everyone was confident working.
• Led engineering team through founding CEO’s unexpected departure with no attrition.

San Francisco, CA, US

• Created GitHub’s Security Products engineering group, expanding scope from a single public-facing feature into a suite of tools for understanding and maintaining dependency security. Grew group from 9 directly-managed.
• Led the engineering integration of GitHub's acquisition of Semmle, now known as GitHub Code Scanning. Coordinated in-person kickoff with US-based GitHub engineers and Oxford, UK-based Semmle engineers, creating an.
• Developed and led onboarding module for all new GitHub hires focused on GitHub’s history and how it informs our approach to distributed work, including focused content about GitHub communication tools and practices and.

San Francisco, CA, US

• Laid the foundation for the GitHub Advanced Security product offering through a series of projects delivered by the two engineering teams I directly managed.
• Led the engineering integration of GitHub's acquisition of Dependabot, moving from deal close to initial public beta in six weeks. This rapid timeline allowed the acquisition to be announced as a marquee part of the.

Overland Park, Kansas, US

• Led engineering team building software to manage process variability and deliver reliable data on care delivery in an ambulatory surgical setting.
• Hired gender-diverse initial in-house engineering team distributed between Austin and Denver to take over pre-existing product developed by external consultancy.
• Managed executive team through decision to significantly pivot initial MVP strategy after testing revealed it was not achieving the business or clinical goals it was designed to meet.
• Led engineering team in delivering new version of the product on a tight deadline to meet investor and market expectations.

• Led 24-person WellMatch engineering team into merger with iTriage, retaining more than 85% of the team (including all leadership) six months post-merger through proactive communication and countless one-on-one.
• Coached integration of fully-distributed WellMatch team and colocated iTriage team, including facilitating integrated remote/onsite meetings and building a culture of pair programming between remote and in-office.
• Guided rewrite of core WellMatch search architecture by prioritizing completion of functionality that could be launched incrementally. This allowed the company to begin realizing value from the rewrite and secured.

• Closely mentored two senior engineers, both of whom were promoted and became successful engineering managers themselves.
• Oversaw implementation of an in-house provider directory that replaced a previous third-party implementation. Work included implementation of complex business rules to support provider participation/non-participation.
• Pioneered approach of using HIPAA 271 eligibility and benefits data in conjunction with negotiated cost data from insurance claim extracts to calculate members’ out-of-pocket cost for a given procedure/provider.

• One of four initial in-house engineers hired to take over existing software product from team of external consultants.
• Improved WellMatch search execution time by over 300% through parallelizing the search process and delivering results to the client via a websocket connection.
• Designed interview and hiring process that guided growth of team from 4 to 24 engineers.

Austin, TX, US

• Owned two customer-facing products: ActiveProspect ID, a single sign-on and consolidated billing system for all ActiveProspect products; and BatchRobot, a tool for converting HTTP POST requests to custom-formatted.
• Designed and implemented a custom billing system as part of ActiveProspect ID, including usage tracking across the entire product suite, invoice generation, credit card storage and billing, and handling of expired cards.
• Transitioned BatchRobot from a free beta product into a fully-supported, paid product, including full management of communicating the change to customers.

• Designed and implemented Rails 1.0-based e-commerce platform for online retailer with multi-million dollar revenue to replace aging Microsoft Frontpage and third-party hosted shopping cart system.
• Researched and documented complex manual business policies and procedures, replacing them with automation where possible, and implementing tools to increase the efficiency of manual procedures where automation was not.
• Implemented multi-node, secure hosting stack with robust monitoring to comply with PCI standards for systems handling credit card data.
• Optimized read-intensive navigation, department, and product pages using a combination of MySQL indexing and query optimization along with strategic caching of non-dynamic data.
• Managed all aspects of technology for the business, including configuration and support of desktop and server systems, phone systems, and warehouse logistics systems.