Nick Cox

Senior Director of Engineering | AI-Enabled Product Leadership | Enterprise SaaS

Seattle, Washington, United States

About

Senior engineering leader in enterprise SaaS, currently leading a 40+ engineer organization across product and platform teams at Smartsheet. I focus on AI-enabled product strategy and execution—taking AI from concept to production in ways that meaningfully reduce customer effort and accelerate time-to-value. Most recently, I authored the strategy behind an overhaul of Smartsheet Dashboards, including AI-driven creation and analytics workflows that compressed dashboard build time from ~90 minutes to under 5 minutes. My work sits at the intersection of product strategy, applied AI, and org leadership, with an emphasis on building teams and systems that scale reliably in real-world environments.

Experience

  • Smartsheet (7 yrs 2 mos)
    • Senior Director of Software Engineering
      Dec 2025 - Present · 7 mos

      * Leading a team of 100+ ICs, managers, and directors at Smartsheet across the platform and user-facing teams that power the core product experience * Owning the Grid-to-Table migration: feature parity, performance, and 99%+ user adoption to support enterprise growth * Set the correctness target and drove prioritization that took a high-volume production service (1k req/s) from 99.2% to 99.999%+ * Redesigned org structure across to match team competencies to the company's most critical delivery priorities

    • Director of Engineering
      Nov 2023 - Dec 2025 · 2 yrs 2 mos

      * Drive technical strategy for suite of systems with combined 20k requests/second with a minimum uptime SLA of 99.95% * Create growth plan for expanding system availability into new geographic location * Coach and grow engineering managers in competencies such as performance management, career development, mentorship, working with cross-functional partners, and technical oversight * Support Principal Engineers in identifying and executing on cross-organizational technical challenges, resulting in 60%+ load reduction on critical tables in primary database * Provide leadership and support for an organization of more than 40 members from Software Engineer 1 to Engineering Manager Key Initiatives: * Restructured engineering teams to consolidate management, reducing overhead by 25% and enabling deepened focus on Board View, a key product feature now led by the transitioned manager

    • Senior Software Engineering Manager
      Nov 2021 - Nov 2023 · 2 yrs 1 mo

      * Lead an organization of 4 teams, including 7 direct reports and 13 skip reports, including teams responsible for the Smartsheet Design System, Front End Architecture (shared front-end tooling), Smartsheet Forms, Smartsheet Update and Approval Requests, and AI Formula Builder * Contributed to the proof of concept, product scope, and delivery of Smartsheet’s first to market AI offering * Drove adoption of engineering and product prioritization processes for the design system shared component library that enabled release of all features comprising of Smartsheet’s redesign * Assumed leadership of Smartsheet Forms and Update/Approval requests, services which handle 17MM+ submissions per month with a success rate of 99.95%+ * Supported the team in shipping a multi-phase migration from EC2-based MySQL to a separate RDS instance with zero downtime for 9 tables with a combined 40MM rows

  • Software Engineer at 10,000ft
    Jul 2016 - May 2019 · 2 yrs 11 mos

    Core engineer for a Seattle-based B2B SaaS company specializing in beautiful, collaborative project and resource management tools. Responsibilities include rapid prototyping and collaborative ideation with design director; implementing and maintaining features from the data layer, through the API, to the client; participating in regular code reviews to ensure consistently high code quality standards across application architecture; and writing and presenting technical design reviews for upcoming features. Key achievements: 2018: Improved performance of the API test suite by 19% (80K LOC codebase) 2017: Re-engineered the app’s analytics page, decreasing 95th percentile time-to-interact (TTI) from ~30s to 250ms 2016: Led feature team for a full rewrite of the reporting module in React and Redux, resulting in a 400% performance improvement on initial page render

  • Lead Software Engineer at WINTR
    Jul 2015 - Jul 2016 · 1 yr 1 mo

    Engineering team lead for a boutique creative technology agency with a client list including WikiMedia Foundation, FritoLay, Russel Investments, Microsoft, and CenturyLink Cloud. Responsibilities included building and deploying responsive websites and web applications and contributing to the creation and presentation of technical approach documentation for new business proposals. Key achievements: 2016: Lead engineer during the company’s most profitable quarter (Q1 2016) 2015: Initiated adoption of the Go programming language as a market differentiator through a weekly book club and assigned exercises and projects

  • Software Engineer at Navigating Cancer
    Jul 2012 - Jul 2015 · 3 yrs 1 mo

    Application developer for the market leader in patient relationship management and free oncology community, serving cancer survivors, oncology clinics, and pharmaceutical companies. Responsibilities included employing test-driven development to design, implement, and maintain features; leveraging agile and scrum software development methodologies to keep features tightly scoped and on budget; and utilizing pair programming to ensure DRY, object oriented, maintainable code in collaboration with colleagues. Key achievements: 2015: Member of the authentication team; rewrote user authentication using microservices, resulting in increased security and HIPAA compliance for all 880,000 users 2014: Redesigned and built the homepage with a responsive layout and a 325% improvement in average page load 2012: Rebuilt the patient forms wizard, a 10+ step form process, resulting in a 25% overall decrease in support calls

  • Front-end Web Developer at The Seattle School of Theology & Psychology
    Aug 2010 - Jun 2012 · 1 yr 11 mos

    Front-end developer for the web properties of a local graduate school. Responsibilities included creating pages with and maintaining the content management system powering the school's main web presence, coding and distributed HTML email to mailing lists with nearly 10,000 subscribers, and created a custom website for The Allender Center, the conference arm of The Seattle School. Key achievements: * Designed and built the school’s first digital annual report, a responsively designed website optimized for iPhone, iPad, and Android devices