Nathan T.
5.0
(4)
Staff+ Platform Engineering Coach & Former CTO
Studied at Georgia Institute of Technology
Works at All In Bits
Available today at 12:00 PM UTC
Questions? Start chatting with this coach before you get started.
Nathan's Coaching Offerings
Site Reliability Engineering Recruiting: Start-to-Finish
Expert help on everything from getting the interview to landing the offer.
Starting at $2,25010h+ of coaching
Advance Your Site Reliability Engineering Career
Expert coaching to elevate your skills and achieve your site reliability engineering goals.
Starting at $2,25010h+ of coaching
Nail the Site Reliability Engineering Interviews
Crush the interview through mock interviews, personalized feedback, and more.
Starting at $1,1875h+ of coaching
Custom hourly · $250/hr
Get help with Incident Response, Promotion Strategy, and .
Nathan’s Site Reliability Engineering Qualifications
Experience level: Executive
As a Staff Platform Engineer who's built internal developer platforms from scratch, I know the secret: modern reliability isn't about being on-call heroes—it's about building platforms that make the right thing the easy thing. I've transformed organizations from monthly releases to multiple daily deployments, reduced CI/CD times from 2 hours to 20 minutes, and scaled systems to 30K requests per second with 5 9s availability. The key? Platform engineering that treats developers as customers, not obstacles. My approach to platform engineering focuses on multiplying team effectiveness through self-service infrastructure and golden paths that developers actually want to use. I've built Kubernetes platforms that let junior engineers safely deploy on day one, implemented observability that catches issues before customers notice, and achieved SOC2 compliance in record time without slowing teams down. Whether you're making the leap to Staff+, building your first internal platform, or trying to convince leadership why platform engineering matters, I'll help you transition from fighting fires to building platforms that prevent them. You'll learn to create the leverage that defines Staff+ impact: systems that scale without you, teams that ship without asking permission, and platforms that make 3am pages extinct.
Nathan can help with:
Incident Response
Promotion Strategy
Performance Optimization
System Monitoring
Automation
Freelancing
Site Reliability Engineering
Technical Interview Prep
Behavioral Interview Prep
Nathan also coaches for Software Engineering, Leadership Coaching, Team, and Life Coaching. View all.
About Nathan
I've spent my career making engineering teams happier and more productive, from consulting with 100+ companies to serving as CTO of a VC-backed startup to transforming developer experience at scale. My journey hasn't been conventional. I started with a theatre degree, taught myself to code, and discovered that the human side of engineering is what makes or breaks great teams. After helping raise Series A funding as a founding CTO and building teams from scratch, I realized my superpower: creating environments where developers thrive. I've shipped "impossible" projects in 3 months that others wouldn't touch for a year, reduced CI/CD times from 2 hours to 20 minutes, and achieved SOC 2 compliance in record time. But my proudest achievements? Building teams where developers ship to production fearlessly, where on-call doesn't mean burnout, and where senior engineers stay because they love the work, not just the comp. Through Book Overflow, I've interviewed legends like Kent Beck, Martin Fowler, and Brian Kernighan about what makes great engineering cultures. Now I help engineering leaders and senior ICs create the conditions for sustainable excellence. Because happy developers don't just write better code; they transform entire organizations. I am currently architecting developer happiness while living in Costa Rica, proving that excellent engineering happens when you optimize for human flourishing, not just velocity metrics.
Why do I coach?
Sixteen years ago, someone took a chance on a theatre major who wanted to break into tech. That bet changed my life, and I've been paying it forward ever since. I coach because I've been on both sides of the equation. As a senior engineer, I fought for better tools and saner processes. As a CTO, I learned that culture eats strategy for breakfast. As a consultant, I saw the same patterns destroying talented teams everywhere: burnout disguised as passion, heroics replacing systems, and brilliant engineers leaving not because of the problems, but because of the environment. I've transformed engineering cultures at companies ranging from startups to scale-ups. When I reduced cycle time by 23% at FLYR, it wasn't through pressure, it was by making developers' lives easier. When my team of three shipped an "untouchable" project in 3 months, we succeeded because we prioritized developer happiness alongside business outcomes. Engineering leadership is lonely. Staff+ tracks are poorly defined. The pressure to deliver often crushes the joy that brought us to programming. I coach because I know there's a better way, one where productivity comes from happiness, not despite it; where senior engineers can drive meaningful change; where leaders can build teams that are both high-performing and sustainable. Whether you're an engineering leader trying to retain your best people or a senior IC ready to level up your impact, I've walked that path. Let's create an engineering culture that attracts and retains the best developers, not by offering perks, but by fostering genuine developer happiness.
Work Experience
Software Architect
All In Bits
October 2024 - Present
Software Architect at All In Bits, where I lead blockchain innovation across two chains. I run a small Innovation Lab exploring the bleeding edge of UX/DX for blockchain, while architecting solutions that touch every engineering team. I report directly to the CEO, bridging technical innovation with strategic vision.
Co-founder + Co-host
Book Overflow
June 2024 - Present
A weekly podcast where two software engineers read the books you've been meaning to get to. We dive deep into technical books, career development, and timeless wisdom—then bring on authors and industry leaders to share their perspectives. Your engineering book club, delivered weekly.
Founder
Functionally Imperative
May 2023 - Present
A newsletter and youtube channel about creativity and autotelic pursuits. Weekly thoughts on why slowing down gets you there faster, why the best solutions are elegantly lazy, and why interesting problems matter more than impressive titles. For those forging unconventional paths.
Sr Staff Platform Engineer
Flyr
July 2023 - September 2024
I work closely with Product and Engineer to build a happy and productive engineering culture. I've led initiatives related to Developer Experience, integrating acquisitions into our larger culture of shipping code, and cloud migration initiatives from AWS to GCP. I'm a tech lead who shares IC and management responsibilities and I work hard to provide operational excellence while meeting our business needs. I also work closely with our security team, leading "shift left" initiatives in the organization. I work multi-cloud. I have a deep knowledge in SOC 2 Type2 compliance, AWS and GCP, FinOps, and IDP. Platform engineering, DevOps and +3 skills
Chief Cloud Architect
Clairity, Inc
April 2022 - July 2023
I work cross functionally with product and engineering to design, build, and maintain our cloud infrastructure. This includes designing cloud infrastructure to meet our needs for our Software as a Medical Device (SaMD) and provide a centralized design philosophy for our ML, Analytics, and production engineering teams. As part of this, I've championed AWS Multi account Organizations with Control Tower for streamlined compliance tools. I also work closely with our engineering team to ensure that our security and reliability goals are being met while we build our systems. This includes "supply chain" software management, internal artifact management, security scanning, and low-trust and zero trust patterns for CICD and engineering development flows. Our core tooling is heavily "serverless", so designing highly available, horizontally scalable infrastructure is a core component in my work. This includes tools such as s3, docker, lambda, step functions, DynamoDB and carefully scoped private subnet VPCs to meet HIPAA and FDA medical device requirements.
Owner
rojoroboto
January 2010 - March 2020
rojoroboto, llc has lived in various forms over the years, but it is the primary entity I've used for IT contract and consulting work. Currently, I'm focused on Cloud architecture and Automation. My largest clients are currently Data Science teams focused on ETL and ML pipelines and revolve around container orchestration and data warehousing. I'm an expert in AWS, Container orchestration, CI/CD, Ansible and Airflow. And I really enjoy working with small teams that like to rapidly prototype and deploy.
CTO
Key.co
January 2015 - March 2017
I was the third person hired at Key (and first technical hire) after consulting on the early project. I helped raise seed funding through Series A. I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity build an product and engineering team from scratch, which had grown to a team of eight before I left. While CTO, we developed an automated CI/CD toolset for our application that included Hashicorp Vault, CircleCI, and Docker container orchestration that allowed our small engineering team to safely push code and work productively and predictably form local dev with predictable and reliable translations to deployments. I eventually left to pursue contract and consulting work generally, at which time, I helped hire a new CTO and I stayed on at KEY as a contractor through the end of 2017.
Education
Georgia Institute of Technology
Master's degree, Computer Science
2021 - 2024
Specialization: Computing Systems
Louisiana State University
Bachelor of Arts - BA, Theatre/Theater
2002 - 2006
Focus: Design and Technology
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