Nick Kleinschmidt

nick.kleinschmidt@gmail.com
Boulder, CO

Engineering leader with deep experience scaling high-impact teams and platforms in rapidly evolving software companies. Known for hands-on technical leadership, guiding architecture and execution to deliver scalable, reliable solutions.

Experience

Lattice

Senior Director of Engineering Dec 2024–Present

Director of Engineering Mar 2024–Dec 2024

Leading Platform engineering at Lattice, a team of 40+ engineers responsible for infrastructure, developer tooling, product platform, data management, analytics, and design systems that power the company’s people management and HRIS product suite

Drove strategic realignment of Platform teams to accelerate HRIS and AI product delivery, directly supporting company-wide product goals
Coordinated cross-engineering efforts (20+ teams) to improve site performance for upmarket customers, implement company-wide data access controls ensuring tenant isolation, and streamline service provisioning
Accelerated adoption of AI developer tooling across engineering, achieving measurable gains: nearly 10% of PRs authored by AI, customer bug tickets triaged and resolved using Claude Code, and self-serve technical answers for product managers and customer support through source-aware tools like Unblocked
Introduced reliability initiatives that reduced major site incidents by 60% through comprehensive end-to-end testing, error log attribution and alerting, stronger peer review standards, and AI-based snapshot testing with Meticulous
Oversaw transition from a single datacenter to a multi-region architecture, enabling sales growth by providing EU data hosting for customers
Strengthened engineering leadership by transitioning 2 ICs to management roles and developing 2 Staff+ engineers to lead multiple tech leads

Principal Software Engineer Jun 2023–Mar 2024

Senior Staff Software Engineer Jul 2022–Jun 2023

Company-wide technical lead responsible for engineering strategy and systems architecture across multiple organizations (150+ engineers)

Joined as technical lead for Compensation product area, tasked with increasing reliability of product-specific services; improvements driven in GraphQL federation, gRPC, and authentication led to an expanded role supporting these capabilities across entire engineering organization
Led integration of the newly created HRIS product with the Lattice suite, enabling company adoption for internal HR operations six months ahead of schedule; facilitated architectural agreement to integrate service-oriented HRIS systems with existing monolithic architecture
Drove company-wide architectural evolution from monolith to service-oriented architecture, avoiding microservice complexity while enabling modular development
Delivered high-impact technical contributions including foundational work on distributed authentication, site performance tooling, and cross-cutting framework improvements
Identified critical developer tooling gap and championed creation of dedicated platform frameworks team whose “paved roads” tooling accelerated development and improved software consistency
Acted as the IC representative on the Engineering Leadership Team, engaging in headcount planning, calibrations, and organizational design
Mentored senior engineers, helping level up technical leadership and prepare them for Staff+ roles

Meta (Facebook), Software Engineer - Tech Lead 2019–2022

Led teams across privacy, video calling and business messaging; shipped user-facing features and backend infra at scale

Directed the development of a new Privacy Checkup experience on mobile and web using topic-based navigation to align with user concerns and provide greater control; launched and promoted to nearly two billion people worldwide on Data Privacy Day
Created zero-to-one project focused on delivering personalized privacy education to users; drove the creation of designs, content, ML models for targeting, and experimentation plans, setting up a long-term project for four engineers
Coordinated three teams (30+ engineers) to retire a legacy support on-call rotation, reducing on-call load for the team and simplifying ramp-up for new hires; planned and supervised reassignment of 3000 assets, 600 backlog tasks, and seven products across multiple organizations
Developed a roadmap and end-to-end demo to suggest collaborative activities during video calls; worked with ML team to build out product use cases and development plan, which funded a cross-org working group and development projects
Built and led 4-person team delivering multi-user collaboration tools for Meta Business Suite messaging, enabling businesses to handle customer messages more efficiently through tools for triaging work, communicating context, and providing real-time progress updates; created product vision and roadmap that secured ongoing funding
Contributed to hiring, mentoring, and onboarding efforts to help build stable, effective teams

Software Engineering Consultant 2014–2018

Independent consultant delivering full-stack development and product strategy to early-stage and enterprise clients

Notable engagements

Videology - Tech lead managing system design and technical mentorship for adtech data management platform
- Designed data architecture providing third-party data for online video and linear TV campaigns, supporting real-time decisioning (100K+ reqs/sec) and campaign analytics
- Built out runtime configuration management system enabling reliable worldwide deployment of large configuration payloads and change management tracking
- Implemented gRPC client-side load balancing for internal API calls, eliminating significant latency and internal load balancing costs
Tyrula - Designed and built systems supporting testing for patients with chronic conditions and kiosk data entry at health fairs
Balanced Payments - Developed open-source Ember.js dashboard used by customers to administer credit card processing; managed open-source process including commit guidelines, new developer setup, technical blog, and pull requests
Goldschmitt and Associates - Designed and built React front-end for shift scheduling system for a US Government agency
Tamber - Built a consumer iOS app for finding concerts based on music listening habits
17FEET - Collaborated with design studio to build consumer Android application for reading magazines
E-Agree - Developed prototype Ruby on Rails application for managing legal contracts, which resulted in company funding and product launch

Ring.io, Director of Software Engineering 2011–2012

First engineering hire at SMB telephony startup founded by former colleagues; hired and managed team of six engineers

Created a distributed development process that accelerated iteration and releases for a team spanning the US and Europe
Led development of call center product using a modularized phone calling engine, enabling significant ARPU growth and increased development velocity
Managed development consulting efforts, overseeing requirements gathering, project management, and post-deployment support, which led to substantial follow-on business

LucidMedia, Principal Architect 2008–2011

As part of a four-person development team, created a Display-Side Adtech Platform that was later acquired by Videology

Angel.com, Principal Software Engineer 2006–2008

Built web-configurable telephony systems enabling IVR and cloud call center use cases