A storage engine, not a server upgrade
Our weather-data platform was growing a terabyte a day. I wrote a custom MySQL table handler that brought daily growth down to 12GB and cut average processing time from 20 minutes to 20 seconds.
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 have 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
- Platform architect and engineering org lead
- 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, putting actionable findings in front of 90% of growers.
- Scale
- In production since 2026
Case study
Fifteen years owning one enterprise platform
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
What started as a regional sustainability app became Syngenta's digital seed-recommendation system: a few hundred advisors using it to serve 10,000+ growers in the US and Canada, with Cropwise carrying similar scale into Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Ukraine, Hungary, and other markets. Along the way we rebuilt it from .NET Framework and Knockout on Azure into TypeScript/React and .NET Core/Node.js services on AWS.
20 systems moved from Azure to AWS in six months — 25% lower burn rate, 75% faster deployments.
Salesforce, SAP, and a shared sales-hierarchy abstraction spanning regional commercial models.
OpenTelemetry instrumentation end to end; the same telemetry carried us through SOC 2 Type 2 in 2025.
Career depth
Hard problems I've owned
Twenty-five years of shipping means a few stories. These are the ones I still get asked about.
GPS before smartphones
In the early 2000s I debugged serial carrier-signal issues between GPS units and Dell Axim handhelds for field data collection — no SDKs, no Stack Overflow, just protocol documentation and patience.
SOC 2 without the theater
Took Skyward through SOC 2 Type 2 in 2025 with minimal remediation by building controls on the observability and processes we already ran, instead of bolting on paperwork.
Handing over fifteen years of work
Planned and executed the transition of the Syngenta platforms to internal teams: documentation, mentoring, and honest conversations about what each team was ready to own.
AI in production
Root Cause, in production
The AI feature my team shipped for Syngenta analyzes grower fields weekly and surfaces concerns with suggested mitigations — the decision about what to do stays with the people who know the field. I also run AI-assisted engineering practices and local-model experiments.