Nicholas M.T. Elliott · Engineering Leader
I build teams that ship.
I grew Skyward App Company from one person to 30 — 24 of them engineers — and kept it profitable for sixteen straight years. I led Syngenta's seed-recommendation platforms for fifteen of those, and I stayed close enough to the architecture and the code to be useful in any design review.
Track record
Selected work
Built Skyward App Company from one person into a 30-person firm, profitable for sixteen straight years.
- Role
- Founder, Managing Director, CTO
- Outcome
- Hired and mentored a 24-engineer team, built the delivery practices, and kept client relationships running for a decade or more.
- Scale
- $3.4M peak revenue (2023) · zero unprofitable years
Led Syngenta’s seed-recommendation platforms for fifteen years, from regional tool to global systems.
- Role
- Primary technical partner and architect
- Outcome
- E-Luminate (later GHX Fields) supports a few hundred advisors serving 10,000+ growers in the US and Canada; Cropwise reaches similar scale in markets including Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Ukraine, and Hungary.
- Scale
- 2011–2026 · three continents
Moved 20 production systems from Azure to AWS in six months without pausing feature delivery.
- Role
- Architect and migration lead
- Outcome
- Replaced click-ops with AWS CDK infrastructure-as-code, cut infrastructure burn 25%, made deployments 75% faster, and passed SOC 2 Type 2 in 2025.
- Scale
- 20 systems · 6 months
Shipped Root Cause, an AI feature analyzing 90,000 fields every week in production.
- Role
- Product and engineering lead
- Outcome
- Proactively surfaces agronomic and environmental concerns with suggested mitigations, reaching 90% of growers and saving each dozens of hours per season.
- Scale
- In production since 2026
How I work
Four things I keep doing
Built Teams
Grew Skyward from just me to 30 people — 24 engineers — across the US, India, Brazil, Egypt, and Europe, and kept the company profitable every year.
Modernized Platforms
Moved 20 production systems from Azure to AWS in six months. Infrastructure burn dropped 25% and deployments got 75% faster.
Shipped Production AI
Root Cause analyzes 90,000 grower fields a week and puts actionable findings in front of 90% of growers.
Stayed Technical
From a custom MySQL storage engine in the early 2000s to AWS CDK and LLM pipelines today, I have never stopped doing technical work alongside the leadership work.
Case study
Fifteen years with one client
Syngenta's E-Luminate, GHX Fields, and Cropwise platforms, 2011–2026.
Syngenta · E-Luminate / GHX Fields / Cropwise
From regional tool to global seed-recommendation platform
A relationship that lasted fifteen years because the work held up. I coordinated Syngenta stakeholders and distributed engineering teams through platform growth, an Azure-to-AWS migration, a SOC 2 Type 2 audit, and finally the handoff of the platforms to their internal teams.
Scaled from solo execution to multi-team delivery across the US, India, Brazil, Egypt, and Europe.
20 systems migrated to AWS in six months while feature work continued; deployments got 75% faster.
Planned the transition of mature systems to Syngenta's internal teams — the end state, not an afterthought.