Land id
Interactive property mapping for real estate, land, and conservation.
Principal Engineer
2026 – Present- Working on auth, APIs, and infrastructure.
Principal Engineer at Land id
Hey, I'm Nathan.
Principal engineer in New York. I build distributed systems and the platforms teams run them on — today auth, APIs, and infrastructure at Land id, before that an enterprise AI platform and a knowledge graph for hybrid cloud at HashiCorp. On the side I founded Music League and co-founded Mixtape Hero.
About
Systems people can
actually trust.
I've spent a little over a decade on the unglamorous half of software: consistency guarantees, encryption boundaries, control planes, and the APIs other teams have to live with for years. The work I'm proudest of tends to be invisible when it's going well.
I'm a principal engineer at Land id, working on auth, APIs, and infrastructure. Before that I spent four years at HashiCorp — leading discovery for an enterprise AI platform, and before that Project Infragraph, a real-time knowledge graph unifying resources, ownership, and policy across hybrid cloud. I led that team through the acquisition by IBM.
Alongside all of that I ran Music League for nine years as its sole engineer and operator, from zero to hundreds of thousands of users across six continents. That's where I learned what on-call really costs, and why I care so much about the boring parts.
Platforms
Systems
Practice
“I particularly enjoyed working closely with Nathan. He is super collaborative, kind, and gives good feedback.”
Selected work
Things I've built.
Two consumer products I founded and three pieces of enterprise infrastructure that large regulated customers depend on.
2016 – 2025
Music League
A social music game where friends submit songs to themed rounds, then vote. Sole engineer and operator from zero to hundreds of thousands of users across six continents.
2025 – present
Mixtape Hero
Music discovery through friends, not feeds. Swap tracks around a theme, vote, then see who picked what — playing entirely through Spotify and Apple Music.
HashiCorp · 2024 – 2025
Project Infragraph
A real-time knowledge graph unifying resources, ownership, and policy across hybrid cloud into one queryable source of truth — the context layer AI agents need before acting on production infrastructure.
Workiva · 2019 – 2022
Bring Your Own Key
Customer-managed encryption keys for a FedRAMP-authorized reporting platform. Lead engineer and architect, working directly with security teams at Fortune 100 companies and institutional banks.
Workiva · 2017 – 2019
Encrypted Blob Storage
The encrypted object storage layer underneath Workiva's document platform, built for security and performance — and later extended to become the foundation for Bring Your Own Key.
Experience
Where I've been.
Staff Engineer, Enterprise AI Platform
2026- Led discovery and prototyping for a platform to let customers securely deploy and manage agentic workloads, as either a multi-tenant managed service or a single-tenant on-premise deployment.
Lead Engineer, Project Infragraph
2024 – 2025- Real-time infrastructure knowledge graph unifying resources, applications, ownership, and policy across hybrid cloud into a single queryable source of truth.
Lead Engineer, Consul
2023 – 2024- Partnered with Central Architecture on Consul's v2 resource model — a ground-up redesign migrating the core API from eventual to strong consistency. Grew the team by six engineers.
Lead Engineer, Consul API Gateway
2022 – 2023- Third engineer on the team, then its lead; grew it to seven. Contributed to the Kubernetes Gateway API specification and conformance tests.
Founder
2016 – 2025- Sole engineer and operator for nine years — programming, infrastructure, support, cost management, and 24/7 on-call — from zero to hundreds of thousands of users. Sold my ownership stake in 2025.
Workiva
Cloud-native financial and regulated reporting — SEC filings, SOX compliance, FedRAMP.
Staff Engineer, Data Platform
2019 – 2022- Lead engineer and architect for Bring Your Own Key; architected the platform-wide migration off Adobe Flash and Python 2.
Lead Engineer, Platform Teams
2017 – 2019- Led the distributed graph traversal and calculation engine behind spreadsheet formulas and document edits; eliminated recurring OOM failures and cut operating costs 20%.
Software Engineer, Product Development
2014 – 2017- Core contributor to the Data Collection extension and the team's go-to engineer for customer escalations and root cause analysis.
Let's talk.
Always happy to talk distributed systems, platform strategy, or what it actually takes to run a consumer app solo for nine years.