Nicholas Hall

Portland, OR | 503-752-4353 | nicholasghall@gmail.com

Self-Managing Teams ● Agile Process ● Continuous Delivery

Proven experience building teams that deliver great enterprise software. Servant leader with a deep understanding of how Agile principles translate into effective team practices. Track record of successfully modernizing legacy tech stack while delivering on business priorities.

InComm Payments, Financial services company specializing in gift card fulfillment

• Director of Software Engineering - 9/2020 – 8/2026

• Software Engineering Manager - 9/2018 – 9/2020

• Automation Lead - 4/2016 – 9/2018

Promoted through a series of increasingly responsible roles to lead the department responsible for building Alder, InComm’s best-in-class B2B software platform for gift card delivery. Led long-term iterative modernization effort with outstanding results.

• Managed and developed four self-led, high-performing Agile teams of twenty engineers and two managers

• Implemented complete re-set on team processes focused on Kanban, tight integration with Product team, and small, frequent changes

• Perpetuated high engineering standards through continuous refactoring, pairing and mobbing, and substantive code reviews

• Fueled extraordinary sales growth ($700M to $5B in nine years) while meeting top key metrics at the 98^th percentile

• Built a comprehensive test automation suite (modeled on Martin Fowler’s Test Pyramid) and Continuous Integration pipeline

• Used the Strangler Fig pattern to convert legacy monolith to modular microservices (modeled on Hexagonal Architecture) separated by message queues for resilience and performance

• Tailored SDLC and feature work to maintain PCI 4.0, HITRUST and SOC compliance for security and resilience

• Tracked and optimized DORA metrics:

PECI / Clearesult, Non-profit administering energy efficiency initiatives

• QA Lead – 11/2013 – 12/2015

Hired to build a QA team, establish modern SDLC, and help lead the conversion from Waterfall to Agile; I was converted to individual contributor after this small non-profit was purchased by a larger for-profit company.

• Mentored Business Analysts in adopting Product Organization focused approach to requirements gathering and feature planning

• Championed responsiveness to business stakeholders by implementing a feature backlog and coordinating regular refinements

• Built out a test framework (Java/Selenium) for .NET based webapps

• Helped the dev team to integrate unit tests into their workflow and to shift to Domain Driven Design approach

Webtrends Software, Web Analytics and Business Intelligence startup

• QA Manager - 2008 – 2013

• Lead QA Engineer – 2004 – 2008

• Tech Support Lead - 2000 – 2004

Series of roles of increasing responsibility from entry-level tech support through manual and then automated QA roles to leadership of the Test organization for a large, complex SaaS platform

• Led and developed a team of one manager, four SDETs, and twelve off-shore manual testers

• Improved production release quality by formalizing change management process centered on lower environment testing

• Led the transition from all manual, heavily regression focused testing to automated integration tests implemented during the dev cycle

• Reduced delivery time on completed features from quarterly to bi-weekly

Education

BS Physics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1997

Other Interests

When I get away from the computer, I enjoy woodworking, hiking, cryptic crosswords, and over-complicated boardgames. My current for-fun hacking projects are a text-rpg written in NodeJS, adding HomeAssistant support to my Android mirror, and testing out the just-released Qwen 3.8 27B model on my home LLM rig.