Let’s realize the promise of AI together
Transform the slot machine of AI success into dependable workflows.
Nelson Wittwer
About me
I’ve built products and teams from early-stage startups to big tech. My core values are stability and empathy.
I believe humans and agents can be most impactful to a codebase when it is discoverable, simple, and consistent.
In my experience, agents are most likely to meet a high quality bar when they have deterministic quality feedback loops
Track record of impact
Engineering Manager / Senior Staff Engineer — DevTools
April 2022 – July 2026
Lead engineer behind Shopify’s AI Toolkit.
Shopify’s AI Toolkit is the source of truth for first- and third-party developers/agents to extend Shopify. Designed and implemented quality benchmarks in development with Promptfoo and in production using telemetry from opted-in agents. Code and app generation scored ~90% on syntactic and semantic measures, compared with ~15% for leading off-the-shelf models and harnesses.
Owned automated documentation pipelines for the Shopify development platform across dozens of public and internal APIs. These pipelines used sophisticated checks to ensure that code examples, fields, and descriptions were derived from source code, reducing the risk of stale documentation.
Created and managed dev tools to assist devs/agents in extending Shopify, including Shopify.dev’s integrated AI assistant, open-source SDKs, app templates, Shopify CLI, on-site Elasticsearch integration, and the Partner Developer Community.
Solo Founder
Present
Testing a HIPAA-compliant AI harness for patients, providers, and managers.
Designed and implemented integrations with patient-chart systems so AI responses are grounded in diagnoses, medications, labs, and provider-provided AI guardrails while sensitive patient data remains in the practice’s systems rather than AI providers’ systems.
Created practice-management workflows for urgency-ranked outreach, configurable clinical rules, appointment conversion, and direct measurement of recaptured visits and revenue.
Lead Software Engineer
July 2018 – April 2022 · November 2012 – November 2014
Built and scaled an account aggregation tool from zero to two million users.
Built MX’s web account aggregation platform from the ground up, enabling MX to bring that aggregation channel in-house rather than outsource it. I wrote the initial Rails and Node.js applications, architected a Terraform-managed AWS platform running more than 600 containers, and hired and managed the 16 engineers who scaled it to more than two million users and tens of millions of dollars in value.
Built canary-release automation that deployed proposed changes to a production cohort against business and technical outcomes, documented results directly on each pull request, and conditionally approved merges based on success rates. The system enabled more than 200 deployments per month—over four times the rate of a typical MX service.
Developed and documented two external Rails APIs, including a real-time banking API handling millions of requests per hour for major fintech partners.
Lead Engineer / VP Product
May 2017 – July 2018
Bridged business and development across a company of more than 100 employees.
Directed product planning, releases, training, and issue coordination with engineering, sales, marketing, customers, and leadership.
Managed customer relationships with marketing executives at more than 400 client organizations, including Amazon, Goldman Sachs, Hertz, and Nissan.
Before moving into product leadership, I led a distributed platform of eight Rails applications and five React applications communicating through REST, GraphQL, RabbitMQ, and Kafka, deployed with Docker and Kubernetes.
Operated an Elasticsearch cluster with more than 10,000 data shards processing content from Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, and YouTube.
CTO
November 2014 – May 2017
Led engineering for HIPAA-compliant web, mobile, and 3D healthcare products.
Managed a team of seven cross-disciplinary engineers, strategized with founders, supported fundraising, and wore every other hat that comes with serving as CTO at a seed-funded startup.
Created an internal CRM, a patient care-plan portal, EHR integrations, a custom CMS for our in-house 3D medical content, and an API consumed by our mobile apps.
Implemented infrastructure as code across a HIPAA-compliant AWS stack with Packer, Ansible, and Terraform, materially improving fault tolerance and disaster recovery.
Championed HIPAA and HITRUST compliance through third-party SOC 1 certification which enabled a distribution partnership with Henry Schein
Senior Security Consultant
August 2010 – November 2012
Performed and managed security consulting engagements for more than 18 clients, including Oracle, Hewlett-Packard, Ancestry.com, and Zions Bancorporation.
Performed and managed SOC, SOX, and PCI audit fieldwork, identifying, managing, and mitigating risk while building key relationships with C-level executives and IT managers.
What collaborators say
“His natural-born leadership skills, attention to detail, empathy for the customer, and rockstar dev chops aren’t something you come across every day.”
Let's build together