Portland, OR | 503-752-4353 | nicholasghall@gmail.com | linkedin.com/in/halln
Software Engineering Director who builds and scales teams that deliver high-throughput commercial platforms in regulated industries. Cultivates high-performing teams by hiring and growing the right people, iterating on lightweight processes, and modernizing legacy stacks while delivering on business priorities.
Leadership: Builds teams that self-manage and remain tight and collaborative in remote organizations
Modernization: Experience leading successful multi-year monolith-to-microservices conversion
Methodology: Builds lightweight agile processes that foster accountability and rapid deployment
AI-First: Accelerates delivery and testing with closed (GitHub Copilot) and open (Pi/Qwen/llama.cpp) AI tool frameworks
Compliance: Sustains PCI-DSS 4.0, HITRUST, and SOC 2 in regulated financial services platforms
Led the long-term gradual modernization of a large legacy Fintech platform to event-driven microservices (Kubernetes, RabbitMQ, Hexagonal Architecture) using the Strangler Fig design pattern
Rebuilt team processes around Kanban, tight Product integration, and small frequent changes; sustained engineering standards through pairing, mobbing, and substantive code reviews
Grew volume 20%+ per year for six years while consistently improving performance and meeting ambitious response time OKRs (single-card fulfillment under 3 seconds at the 98th percentile)
Delivered high-profile features that contributed to extraordinary sales growth (from $700M in 2019 to $5B in 2025)
Built InComm’s first true CI/CD platform, using GitHub Actions and blue/green deployments to accelerate deployment frequency from 2/month to 2/day while maintaining a change fail rate of 0.78%
Championed company-wide adoption of Microsoft Entra for CIAM and delivered the flagship implementation on the InComm Incentives Shop site, driving 20% YoY growth in new accounts
Built and managed four high-performing Agile teams of twenty engineers and two managers, hiring ~40 engineers over tenure
Led the development organization through the evolution from on-site to remote, fake Agile to real Agile, and spearheaded AI facilitated development via a spec-driven agentic approach
VoiceGremlin
SaaS tool for implementing automated tests against AI phone agents
Founder / Solo developer | 08/2026 – 09/2026
Leveraged my test automation background, coding skill, Product mindset and knowledge of AI model workflows to build a secure, scalable SaaS tool for testing AI-powered applications.
InComm Payments – Portland, OR
Provider of a B2B API platform for gift card sales and fulfillment across 350+ brands.
Director of Software Engineering | 09/2020 – 08/2026
Led the engineering department building Alder through a multi-year modernization from monolith to event-driven microservices. Led through two engineering managers and four teams of twenty engineers; set engineering standards, technical direction, and hiring.
Automation Lead and Software Engineering Manager | 04/2016 – 09/2020
Managed application development teams for the Alder platform, rebuilding delivery process around Kanban and small frequent changes.
PECI / Clearesult – Portland, OR
Non-profit delivering energy efficiency initiatives.
QA Lead | 11/2013 – 12/2015
Led the QA team, established modern SDLC and the adoption of Agile; built a Selenium test framework for .NET webapps; helped the dev team adopt Domain Driven Design.
Webtrends Software – Portland, OR
Web analytics and business intelligence SaaS platform.
QA Manager | 2008 – 2013
Led a team of one manager, four SDETs, and twelve off-shore manual testers; led the transition from manual regression testing to automated integration tests in the dev cycle, reducing feature delivery time from quarterly to bi-weekly.
BS Physics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign