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Nick Rios

Forward-Deployed Engineer & Solutions Architect
Ewa Beach, Hawaii· n.rios1997@gmail.com· linkedin.com/in/nicolas-rios-039038108· nick-rios.com

Solutions architect and forward-deployed engineer with 7+ years getting AI and integrations into regulated, data-sensitive production. I run the technical sale myself, from first architecture call through cutover. Work has ranged from cloud-native architecture for securing Australian classified documents to developer tooling for enterprise financial institutions in Texas. Based in Hawaii, working remotely with teams anywhere.

Experience

Tonic.ai2022 – Present
Senior Solutions Architect
  • Technical lead on enterprise deals; own the technical sale end to end: discovery, architecture, custom demos, evaluation, and deployment.
  • ~$3M in new & expansion ACV directly attributed; ~$5M including renewals and out-year ramp.
  • Stood up the enterprise motion at strategic accounts — fewer logos, far higher ACV per deal.
Clearbit (acquired by HubSpot)2021 – 2022
Senior Technical Support Engineer
  • Owned the hardest enterprise escalations; re-implemented customer solutions across platforms.
  • Built automation and reusable playbooks that cut first-response and resolution time by 50%+.
Talkdesk2019 – 2021
Integrations / Expert Services Engineer
  • Built custom middleware and Salesforce integrations that moved $1M+ in deals across the line.
  • Shipped real-time Zoom + Microsoft sync into the Callbar integration suite.
  • Authored the implementation methodology the services team still runs on.

Selected projects

Gostly

Self-hosted proxy that captures real upstream traffic, redacts it in-tenant, and replays it as a deterministic mock for testing AI agents. No LLM in the hot path; single-tenant.

UCLA-backed venture

Co-founded a peer-to-peer rental marketplace for college campuses (2017–2018). Pitched angels and VCs; led development and go-to-market.

Skills

AI / ML
RAG pipelines, LoRA / PEFT fine-tuning, prompt engineering, eval & confidence scoring
Cloud & Infra
AWS, GCP, Azure, Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD, Prometheus
Languages
Python, TypeScript, Rust, SQL, Java, C++
Frameworks
Next.js, FastAPI, React, Axum, Tailwind
Data & Integration
PostgreSQL, REST APIs, ETL, ODBC, CRM / CDP, Salesforce

Education

UCLA
B.S. Electrical & Computer Engineering
2015 – 2019

Certifications & training

AWS Cloud Practitioner
AWS Containerized Apps
Google IT Support