Reading, England, United Kingdom
Nick Liffen is a hands on technical leader with a blend of experience across Engineering, Product, and Revenue/Sales/GTM. Currently serving as Senior Director of Product, Technical Architects & Programs at GitHub, he leads global teams, embedding customer insights into product development within GitHub’s Security, Copilot, and Enterprise offerings. Previously, he lead transforming GitHub Advanced Security into one of the industry’s top application security products. Known for his approachable yet results focused leadership, Nick enjoys being between strategy and execution. At Eli Lilly, he demonstrated his technical and organizational leadership by directing the digital response for Lilly's COVID 19 testing facility. Passionate about building collaborative teams and driving measurable outcomes, Nick consistently delivers impact through structured, strategic initiatives that elevate business performance.
Lead a team of global product leaders, focused on embedding customer insights into product development for GitHub's Security, Copilot & Enterprise Products. Oversee our GTM strategy and global technical architecture and programs teams, driving strategic customer engagements and enhancing field service operations with structure, organization, and effective reporting.
Responsible for leading Lilly's shift in adopting cutting-edge software development practises across the whole Information & Digital Solution (IDS) organisation, as well as spearheading Lilly's DevOps Transformation journey.
Currently responsible for overseeing software development within Lilly's emerging technologies team. With a growing team of 8 people, my main efforts focus on building a team enabling developers around Lilly by promoting reusability with: Jenkins Shared Libraries, Lambda Functions (FaaS), NPM Modules & API's. The end goal is to help promote InnerSourcing across the enterprise.
Eli Lilly relocated me to the USA for a 12-month assignment. With one main focus, helping form & implement a strategy for how InnerSourcing can drive value for Lilly. By the end of this role, Lilly had built a strategy of InnerSourcing, which fostered the creation of 76 reusable software artefacts, with a combined download total of over 700,000+ used across 919 applications. I presented at GitHub Universe on Lilly's InnerSourcing journey and strategy, which went on to win GitHub's InnerSourcing award 2018.
As part of my degree I undertook an industrial placement working in Solution Services - working with hardware such as upgrading PC's and moving physical servers over to virtual servers. I was the IT lead for moving legacy equipment in pharmaceutical research to newer more updated equipment. I have been given the role of delegating certain project workloads to other colleagues which has increased my team working capability and leadership skills. So far this year I have gained valuable experience and skills.
Part time job working as an IT Help Advisor for the University of Portsmouth; I undertook this role alongside my studies during my second year. My role was to help students with basic IT problems such as: printer problems, Microsoft Office problems and retrieving lost files. I gained experience working in an IT environment in addition to experience of working in a larger company.