Distributed Systems & Platform
Production Kubernetes, multi-arch container builds, observability, and CI/CD. Designs that survive contact with the on-call rotation.
NICK LLC is the independent software consulting practice of Nick Kirsch — designing, building, and operating distributed systems, AI-powered services, and the small, durable tools that hold a business together.
Services
AI & Agent Engineering
Claude- and LLM-powered agents that reliably take action: training plan generators, autonomous patch services, document-to-data pipelines, voice/IVR transcription. Eval-driven and cost-conscious.
Integrations & Data Plumbing
Bridging ERP, CRM, field service, calendars, fitness platforms, banking, and payroll — with audit trails, idempotent syncs, and the discipline of a long-running production system.
Native & Web Front Ends
Swift/SwiftUI on iOS and watchOS, modern HTML/CSS/JS on the web, and dashboards that make complex telemetry legible to the humans who depend on it.
Technical Leadership
Fractional CTO, architecture reviews, and incident-driven remediation. Two decades of shipping software with small teams.
Product Strategy for Builders
Translating an operator's intuition into a roadmap, a prototype, and a measurable shipping plan.
Selected Work
A representative sample of software shipped under the NICK LLC mark or built and operated by its principal. Many systems are running in production today.
Twenty-Four
Multi-service platform integrating Strava, Intervals.icu, Google Calendar, Pushover, and the Claude API. Generates AI training and meal plans conditioned on fitness load, syncs workouts bi-directionally with calendars, and exposes everything through a unified dashboard. Seven Go services with hourly and 15-minute reconciliation loops.
atsu.io
Founded atsu, a startup building observability and ChatOps for high-performance compute clusters in financial services and media-and-entertainment. Shipped a job-anomaly product, queue prediction, a Kafka + custom-BPF data pipeline, and a chat-driven interface for cluster operators.
auto-builder
A board where members file requests and an unattended Claude Code agent builds the approved ones into pull requests, merges them on green CI, and deploys them. It builds itself at builder.extreme.org, runs several family sites, and powers extreme.org, where every app gets its own repo, board, and agent and ships to its own subdomain. Successor to automated-patches, an issue-to-draft-PR agent.
More projects
Intervals.ai
A native iOS client for the Intervals.icu training platform.
Structured-workout management, calendar-style planning, and a
design-first architecture documented in DESIGN.md
and a Swift API reference.
Home Infrastructure
A self-hosted Kubernetes cluster running services for DHCP and Wi-Fi monitoring, a Honeywell alarm-panel HTTP bridge over EnvisaLink, a remote-Chrome service, Homebridge, and a welcome page. Battle-tested ground for the patterns NICK LLC takes to client work.
Finances
A long-running double-entry bookkeeping system: institution-specific statement importers, Fava UI, automated balance scrapers, and a web dashboard. Demonstrates a bias toward auditable, plain-text, owner-operable tools.
Past Consulting Engagements
- Pixar Animation Studiosrender pipeline & HPC tooling
- Dato / TuriSeattle ML platform (acq. Apple, 2016)
- Igneous SystemsSeattle distributed-storage startup (acq. Rubrik, 2020)
About
NICK LLC is a Washington limited liability company offering software consulting and engineering services under the service mark New Ideas for Creation and Knowledge℠. Its principal is Nick Kirsch, a Seattle-based software engineer with two decades of experience across distributed systems, developer tooling, and high-performance computing. Prior roles include founder and CEO of atsu and CTO of the EMC Isilon Storage Division.
More about the principal is at nick.org.
Engage NICK LLC
For new engagements, advisory retainers, or one-off consults, schedule a meeting with Nick.
- Web: llc.nick.org
- GitHub: github.com/nkirsch
- LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/nickkirsch