Nick Wilkens

Hands-On Software Architect | Applied AI & Distributed Systems

Ponte Vedra Beach, FLnick.wilkens@mnxsolutions.com linkedin.com/in/nickwilkens github.com/nwilkens

Technology executive and hands-on software architect with 25+ years building cloud infrastructure, distributed systems, virtualization platforms, and developer tooling. Over the past several years designed and deployed production AI systems that accelerate software engineering through agentic workflows, RAG, LLM-powered developer tooling, and AI-assisted operations. Known for building greenfield platforms and turning emerging technologies into production systems, leading through implementation rather than slideware. Writes production software daily in Rust, Go, and Python across cloud infrastructure, AI tooling, and developer platforms.

Experience

Chief Technology Officer

Edgecast Cloud (Sovren Technologies) 2024–Present

Designed and deployed an AI-native software engineering platform integrating Claude Code, local LLMs, and OpenAI into daily development workflows
Built AI-assisted development workflows spanning architecture generation, implementation, code review, documentation, debugging, testing, and deployment validation
Built production agentic workflows coordinating architecture analysis, implementation planning, documentation generation, incident investigation, and engineering decision support
Standardized AI development environments enabling every engineer to work within AI-assisted workflows
Developed retrieval-augmented engineering knowledge systems combining internal docs, source code, architecture references, and operational runbooks
Established AI governance, security, and engineering policies for safe enterprise LLM adoption
Directed architecture of Triton Cloud spanning virtualization, distributed storage, networking, CDN, and AI-assisted operations

Founder & CEO

MNX Solutions / MNX.io 2007–2024

Founded managed infrastructure and cloud business (2007); launched MNX.io cloud platform (2013)
Negotiated and completed acquisition of Triton DataCenter and SmartOS from Samsung
Architected software powering the MNX.io public cloud platform: orchestration, provisioning, billing, identity, automation, and operations — ran in production for over a decade
Directed platform development across compute, software-defined networking, distributed object storage, and virtualization (bhyve, KVM, containers)
Contributed to stewardship of the SmartOS and illumos open-source projects alongside the community: release engineering, build infrastructure, community governance
Led company through acquisition by Edgecast (2024)

Systems Architect

Holcim 1999–2007

Led one of North America's earliest large-scale enterprise Linux migrations — SAP from AIX to Linux; largest SAP-on-Linux installation in North America as of 2004
Managed enterprise AIX and HP-UX infrastructure, SAP environments supporting global manufacturing operations

Core Expertise

Applied AI

Agentic systems, RAG, MCP, function calling, structured outputs, AI evaluation, local/self-hosted models

Cloud & Distributed Systems

Kubernetes, bhyve, KVM, virtualization, AI infrastructure

Languages

Rust, Python, Go

Leadership

Engineering leadership, architecture generation, team standardization

Technologies

Languages

RustPythonGo

AI

Claude CodeAnthropic ClaudeOpenAIGitHub CopilotCursorCodexOllamaLM StudioMCPLangChainvector databasesRAGfunction callingstructured outputsagent frameworksAI evaluation

Infrastructure

LinuxSmartOSillumosKubernetesDockerbhyveKVMFoundationDBPostgreSQLNATSKafkaRedis

Cloud

Triton DataCenterAWSAzureOpenStack

Open Source

One of the maintainers of the SmartOS and Triton DataCenter open-source projects (github.com/TritonDataCenter). Personal projects at github.com/nwilkens.