Nick Willard

About

Solving hard problems at scale

I'm a Senior Software Engineer with 10+ years of experience across backend engineering, cloud architecture, and DevOps. I specialize in the work most teams avoid — legacy modernization, enterprise-scale migrations, and building the infrastructure that millions of transactions flow through daily.

Currently a Senior Software Engineer at Capital One, driving cloud infrastructure modernization and AI tooling adoption across the post-acquisition integration team — work that directly impacts tens of millions of transactions per day.

I don't just write code. I reduce defects by 40%, cut release cycles from hours to minutes, and architect the systems your team will build on for years. If you need someone who owns a problem end-to-end and delivers measurable results, let's talk.

              Fintech
              Discover · Mastercard · Equifax · Clearent
            

              Cloud
              AWS · Azure · HashiCorp Terraform Certified · Multi-cloud architect
            

              Full Lifecycle
              Architecture → Implementation → Observability → Delivery
            

Experience

Career Timeline

Capital One Aug 2025 – Present

Senior Software Engineer PostgreSQL · AWS (Fargate, Aurora, Lambda) · Jenkins · Docker · Golang

Cloud Migration: Selected as a core member of the specialized 11-person unit migrating Discover's benefits platform onto Capital One's cloud infrastructure.
Infrastructure & Security: Designed and implemented PostgreSQL schema best practices and automated AWS Security Group provisioning, establishing a secure and scalable foundation for the new platform.
AI Tooling: Developed custom Claude AI Skills to enforce coding standards and automate both pull request and architecture reviews — catching bugs and identifying opportunities for cost reduction and performance improvements before they reached production.
AI Adoption: Founded "Vibe Code Friday," a recurring team meeting where engineers showcase how they're using AI tooling in their daily workflows, accelerating adoption and surfacing new use cases across the team.
Code Quality: Standardized engineering practices across all repositories by implementing pre-commit hooks and a consistent static analysis toolchain (golangci-lint, gofmt), reducing code review overhead and catching issues at commit time.

Discover Jul 2024 – Aug 2025

Application Engineer & Team Lead Java 17 · Spring Boot · Spring Batch · Go · AWS (EC2, S3, Lambda) · Docker · Jenkins

Merger Readiness: Co-led technical preparation of core financial products for the strategic merger with Capital One (May 2025), ensuring system stability and data integrity throughout the transition.
Process Optimization: Created custom ServiceNow and Jira dashboards to track vulnerabilities and incidents, reducing daily standup duration by 60% (from 40 mins to 15 mins).
Developer Tooling: Built a real-time service status monitor to visualize downstream dependencies, eliminating wait times and increasing team testing velocity by 30%.
Modernization: Refactored legacy Spring Batch workflows and transitioned Java services into high-performance Go binaries and Docker containers to improve scalability.

Mastercard Oct 2022 – Jul 2024

Senior Software Engineer Java · Spring Boot · Microservices · Axon Framework · Redis · PostgreSQL

Architected the decomposition of a large legacy monolith into Spring Boot microservices for Mastercard's high-availability 3D Secure (3DS) platform, supporting millions of global authentication requests daily.
Designed event-driven architecture with the Axon Framework, improving system responsiveness and throughput by 30%.
Led Oracle → PostgreSQL migration reducing licensing costs by 50%+; integrated Redis caching to accelerate high-frequency reads by 20–35%.
Enforced 90%+ test coverage across microservices with JUnit/Mockito, reducing production defects by ~25%.

Mastercard Dec 2021 – Oct 2022

Senior BizOps Engineer Apache NiFi · AWS · Databricks · Datadog · Splunk

Designed multi-region data pipelines using Apache NiFi, processing terabytes of business-critical data across global environments.
Key contributor to the "Customer 360" initiative using AWS and Databricks to centralize fragmented customer data, improving analytical accuracy by 30%+.
Implemented monitoring and alerting frameworks reducing MTTD by 60%; automated deployments cutting manual time by 50%.

Ungerboeck Software International Nov 2018 – Nov 2021

Software Engineer II C# · .NET Core · Azure DevOps · PowerShell · Angular · Node.js

Built PowerShell/Chocolatey automation scripts to provision developer workstations, cutting onboarding from 4+ hours to under 30 minutes and reducing maintenance toil by 60%.
Modernized the frontend CI pipeline (Gulp 4 + Angular 11), achieving 35% faster transpilation and reducing build failures by ~25%.
Implemented AppOptics APM for a global event-management platform (stadiums, convention centers, Dallas Mavericks), reducing MTTD by 40%.

DevOps Engineer Equifax Dec 2017 – Nov 2018

Software Engineer Clearent Apr 2015 – Dec 2018

Solving hard problems at scale

Verified Credentials

Career Timeline

Technical Toolkit

Core Languages

Cloud & Infrastructure

DevOps & CI/CD

Observability & Data

Databases

Frameworks & Libraries

Let's work together