Nicholas Stanford

Full-Stack Software Engineer

Full-Stack Software Engineer with 6 years’ experience building web applications end to end: schema and API design, queue-based third-party integrations, cloud infrastructure, and responsive front-end interfaces. I currently build lead-marketplace and ad-platform integrations in Laravel, Vue, and TypeScript on GCP, and I write code and monitoring expecting that another developer will have to read, understand, and extend both.

Work Experience

SolarReviews / Solar Investments — Full-Stack Software Engineer

11/2025 – Present, Denver, CO (remote)

Consumer home-services and comparison-shopping media company (fixr.com, howmuch.net, howmuch.co.uk); lean engineering team where I own features end to end, from schema and API design through infrastructure, deployment, and production monitoring.

  • Engineered an insurance lead ping/post pipeline connecting our consumer flows to marketplace buyers (MediaAlpha, QuoteWizard), and fixed go-live blockers where schema and attribution bugs silently disqualified 100% of submitted leads, taking QuoteWizard revenue from zero to live.
  • Built offline-conversion upload pipelines to Google Ads, Meta, and Microsoft Ads for an ad operation spending $5M+/month, then root-caused a silent 113-run production outage and shipped a heartbeat-monitoring subsystem (18 checkers, Slack alerting) so ad-platform failures surface in minutes instead of weeks.
  • Architected a CRM disposition-sync platform with integration clients for ~10 third-party CRMs (ServiceTitan, Acculynx, Go High Level, Monday.com, Zoho, and others) plus a CSV import path with an AI-assisted field-mapping reviewer (Gemini / Vertex AI); 26,000+ lead-outcome records ingested in early rollout.
  • Designed and shipped a production analytics dashboard solo, from Terraform-managed GCP infrastructure (Cloud Run, Cloud SQL, GCS, Workload Identity Federation) through server-side data ingest, self-serve admin auth, and a budget-pacing feature, in Next.js/React/TypeScript.
  • Implemented engine-level primitives in our consumer flow renderer, including conditional field visibility and TTL-clamped, PII-denylisted resume-state persistence for returning visitors, a recovery path now exercised in ~15% of flow sessions.
  • Built an advertising cost/revenue reporting platform reconciling Google Ads spend against MediaAlpha and QuoteWizard revenue across two sites, with queue retry/failure handling.
  • Automated marketplace onboarding by distilling a five-PR integration into a 12-step playbook plus a purpose-built AI subagent, so the next lead-marketplace integration doesn’t repeat the slog.

Northrop Grumman — Principal Software Engineer

01/2024 – 11/2025, Aurora, CO

  • Developed and maintained features, bugfixes, and Dockerfiles for Python and Java Spring microservices.
  • Created GitLab CI/CD pipelines to build, scan, and deploy Docker containers.
  • Integrated services to K8s clusters using Helm; troubleshot pod state errors using kubectl and K9s.
  • Developed a Python test driver package and implemented integration tests using the Python Robot Testing Framework.
  • Eliminated manual test procedure steps with automations, including log scraping and data management methods interacting with AWS EKS, S3, and NoSQL databases like Mongo and DynamoDB.

Edgewater Federal Solutions — Application Programmer

09/2022 – 01/2024, Sandia National Labs, Albuquerque, NM

  • Developed full-stack web applications for DOE using Java (Spring Boot, Tomcat), C#, .NET, and SQL (MySQL, Oracle SQL, PostgreSQL).
  • Optimized queries on relational databases and processed large data sets to generate reports such as supply chain risk analyses.
  • Used the Selenium WebDriver with Java for end-to-end testing, including testing user flows such as logging in.
  • Implemented backend logic for .NET apps using Python, including creating Excel workbooks.

University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center — Systems Analyst/Programmer

07/2020 – 09/2022, Albuquerque, NM

  • Administered AWS EC2 instances and S3 buckets; configured a DMZ subnet, firewall port-forwarding rules, and reverse-proxy request forwarding.
  • Improved mobile compatibility by implementing JavaScript and custom CSS rules while migrating static sites to Drupal CMS.
  • Automated workflows for reporting project milestones to NIH using Bash, Python, and the University of Miami’s RSS API, cutting a multi-day manual process to minutes on a monthly cron.
  • Developed data dashboards and visualizations to support drug research efforts using CSS and Tabulator JS.

Indra — IT Specialist

08/2018 – 07/2020, Boulder, CO

  • Monitored and maintained Linux hosting infrastructure including Apache web servers, mail servers, and DNS nameservers.
  • Automated systems administration workflows, including migration of sites to updated servers, using Bash and Python scripting.

Colorado Code Club — Youth Coding Instructor

08/2017 – 01/2018, Denver, CO

  • Taught an after-school program for elementary students building sprite-based video games in MIT Scratch.

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science — University of Colorado Denver, 05/2020

  • Led award-winning capstone: an interactive musical environment built with Unity, C#, and the ChucK programming language. Engineering Capstone Expo winner in Computer Science; second place People’s Choice at the CU Research and Creative Activities Symposium.
  • Developed concurrent and multithreaded applications in Java and Python, a MERN full-stack movie database, and RESTful APIs over SQL/NoSQL databases.

Certifications

Active TS/SCI

Projects

  • nicholasstanford.dev (2023–Present): my personal website. Rebuilt in 2026 as a static Astro site — hand-authored semantic HTML and CSS, self-hosted variable fonts, zero client-side JavaScript — deployed on Vercel with managed TLS. Previously operated it as a containerized React app on a self-hosted Node.js server: multi-stage hardened Dockerfile, Certbot certificate issuance and auto-renewal, DNS, and container health monitoring, retired deliberately after running it long enough to weigh the upkeep against the benefit.
  • ascending-blucifer (2026): Laravel 12 + Vue 3 CMS site built from scratch: Sanctum-auth admin panel, markdown editor, dark mode, dynamic public theming. github.com/Stanfordna
  • solarreviews-invoice-app (2025): Laravel 11 + Vue/Vite invoice management app. github.com/Stanfordna

Skills

Languages & Frameworks: PHP (Laravel 11–13), JavaScript/TypeScript, Vue 3, React, Next.js, Python, SQL; working history in Java (Spring Boot) and C#/.NET

Cloud & DevOps: GCP (Cloud Run, Cloud SQL, Cloud Storage, Workload Identity Federation), Terraform, Docker, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI/CD, Laravel Horizon; prior AWS (EC2, S3, EKS) and Kubernetes/Helm

Architecture & Data: REST API design, third-party API integration (Google Ads, Meta, Microsoft Ads, MediaAlpha, QuoteWizard), queue-based pipelines with retry/failure handling, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis, schema/migration design, monitoring & alerting

Tools & Testing: PHPUnit feature tests, Robot Framework and Selenium integration testing, PHPStan, Statamic/Antlers CMS, AI-assisted engineering (Claude Code, Codex, CodeRabbit workflows)