Nicholas Woods

Director of Engineering at Hartwell Solutions | ex-McKinsey & Company

Hartwell Solutions

San Francisco, CA · PT (UTC-8)

12+ years experience

Columbia University

English

Advising Co-founder

Messaging unavailable

Overview

Based in San Francisco. I lead application security at Hartwell Solutions. Led the migration of 77 services to OWASP. Wrote the Scala service that now handles 64 million requests a day. Before that: McKinsey & Company and Pinterest. Most at home with IAM and AppSec. I mentor students through university programmes.

Good reasons to reach out

Advice on application security
People who want to build this with me
Thoughtful intros to people in my field
Working sessions on Scala

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Offshore staffing offers
Courses and coaching offers

Checks messages twice a week

Skills

OWASPIAMcloud securityAppSecScala

AdvisingOpen to advising

closes in 3 months

Office hours for career switchers into engineering: application security and Scala

Topics: application security, IAM, cloud security
Format: Async reviews
Terms: Equity
Capacity: One advisory role at a time
Best for: First-time founders

12 years of application security. One call a month or async reviews.

San Francisco, CAowaspcloud securityappsec

Open

Co-founderLooking for a co-founder

closes in 3 months

Looking for a design-minded co-founder for code review for hospital networks

The idea: Code review for hospital networks
Stage: Idea
I bring: 7 years in application security
Looking for: Commercial co-founder who has sold to enterprises
Commitment: Part-time to start
Location: San Francisco or remote

I bring 12 years of application security (currently Hartwell Solutions). Ideally you've run operations in North America. Full-time from day one.

San Francisco, CAowaspappsecscala

Open

Experience

Director of Engineering
Feb 2026 - Present
Hartwell Solutions · 8 mo · Full-time · San Francisco, CA
- Shipped a rewrite that took build times from 29 minutes to under 6.
- Brought on-call pages for product security down from 20 a week to 1.
Engineering Manager
Feb 2023 - Nov 2025
McKinsey & Company · 2 yr 9 mo · Full-time · San Francisco, CA
- Mentored 11 engineers through their first promotion.
- Cut p99 latency on the product security services from 515ms to 53ms.
Senior Security Engineer
Jun 2019 - Feb 2023
Pinterest · 3 yr 8 mo · Contract · San Francisco, CA
- Grew the product security team from 4 to 30 engineers.
- Cut p99 latency on the product security services from 873ms to 107ms.
Security Engineer
Sep 2016 - Jun 2019
KPMG · 2 yr 9 mo · Full-time · San Francisco, CA
- Cut p99 latency on the product security services from 453ms to 105ms.
- Moved 83% of product security traffic off a legacy monolith without a customer-facing incident.
Security Engineer
Dec 2014 - Jun 2016
Amazon · 1 yr 6 mo · Full-time · San Francisco, CA
- Brought on-call pages for product security down from 14 a week to 2.
- Reduced cloud spend on product security by 43% in two quarters.

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Education

Columbia University
BA, Electrical Engineering
2010 - 2014

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