A recommendation from a former CTO.

FROM A FORMER CTO

To Whom It May Concern:

I’m writing to recommend Nick Davis without reservation. I had the privilege of working directly with Nick from 2016–2023, first when I left my position at Microsoft and took my first CTO role at Edgenet and then through the acquisition that brought us into Syndigo.

Over that period, Nick started as a valued member of our IT organization, growing into the role of Director of DevOps, which surely should have been a VP or SVP title at his level. He is one of the most capable engineering leaders I have worked with in my career.

When I joined Edgenet as CTO, our DevOps and Platform functions were largely undefined. I was extremely lucky to have Nick already on staff who, with nearly zero direction from me, built it all from the ground up: the processes, the tooling, the deployment pipelines, the monitoring, and the operational culture that made everything else possible.

He architected and ran our platform on Azure and quickly learned and built out a Kubernetes infrastructure at a time when K8s was still in its infancy. As we acquired companies operating on AWS, he absorbed that environment just as fluently.

He drove millions of dollars in cloud cost reductions without sacrificing reliability, and he stood up the compliance and security posture — SOC 2 Type 1 and Type 2, along with successful penetration testing — that our enterprise customers demanded.

By the time I left, this ecosystem was running a SaaS platform utilized by more than 18K brands and hundreds of retailers, with thousands of concurrent users, while maintaining 99.99% uptime at a cost of less than $8 per customer per month.

What set Nick apart was how he performed under pressure. He helped me navigate the acquisition by Syndigo, which was complicated by being right on the eve of COVID and lockdown. Over the years we worked together, the company moved through the better part of a dozen other acquisitions.

Integrating acquired systems, teams, and technical debt is some of the hardest work in this industry, and Nick handled it again and again with a steadiness that kept our platform stable while the organization around it kept changing.

System reliability was never a topic in leadership meetings, which is the highest compliment. Things just worked. In an ecosystem where minor mistakes can accumulate hundreds of thousands of dollars in excess cloud compute, Nick adeptly managed our costs and scale without the financial heartburn that usually accompanies these activities.

The modern ecosystem and DevOps strategy Nick built was a highly valuable asset when Syndigo acquired us, and he was instrumental in making the company an attractive target. He turned operational maturity into a competitive advantage that showed up at the negotiating table.

Our SaaS platform, ecosystem, and DevOps team became the cornerstone of the overall combined organization.

Nick is an exceptional manager of people, and his peers universally enjoyed working with him. Across his tenure, he maintained zero regretted turnover, which is genuinely impressive given that so many members of his team came through acquisition rather than direct hiring.

He holds a high bar and creates an environment where strong employees want to stay. He was a genuine partner to me: direct when he disagreed, reliable when it counted, and consistently focused on the outcome rather than the credit.

I would hire Nick again in a heartbeat, and I expect he will be a significant asset wherever he lands. If it would be helpful to discuss his work in more detail, I am happy to make myself available.

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Brian Rudolph

Former Chief Technology Officer
Syndigo

Current Chief Technology Officer
Beck Technology