nr.NICHOLAS
ROBERTS

AI TRANSFORMATION & TECHNOLOGY OPERATIONS

Nicholas (Niccolo) Roberts

I build products
that customers buy
and people love

I’m Nicholas Roberts. I connect AI, commerce, and data with the people who run the business.

Hands-on technology leadership for growing midsize companies. From the roadmap to the code, the rollout, and the operating reality.

Explore my work Download resume PDF

🇦🇺 🇺🇸San Francisco Bay AreaHands-on VP / CTO / Director

niccolox@devekko.comwww.niccolox.com
Nicholas Roberts wearing a navy blue jacket
Nicholas RobertsTECHNOLOGY + PRODUCT LEADERSHIP

Selected career impact

40%

Group-wide revenue growth supported by technology modernization

DIGITAL BEVERAGE GROUP
2M

Historical orders migrated, representing $150M in order value

COMMERCE MIGRATION
200

Users served across corporate IT and business applications

TECHNOLOGY OPERATIONS
25+

Years building, delivering, and operating digital systems

BUSINESS + TECHNOLOGY

01 / SELECTED WORK

From business problem
to working system.

Commercial delivery and independent engineering, with the details behind the work.

DIGITAL BEVERAGE GROUP / 2025–2026

Director of Technology & Operations

Wine e-commerce.
Startup → scale-up.

Led the technology modernization of a multi-brand wine e-commerce business, replacing a legacy platform with Shopify Plus and Linnworks WMS without disrupting trading.

4storefronts
2mobile apps
6commerce models
35,000SKUs / 20 brands
  • Product and vendor ownership. Own 4 e-commerce storefronts and 2 React Native mobile apps: roadmap, prioritization, contracts, and vendor performance across the full commerce surface.
  • A growing mobile channel. Delivered the mobile apps on Shopify, now a major and fast-growing sales channel for the business.
  • Six models, one catalog. Supported flash sales, full-price shop, private sales, auction, wine club, and conversational/chat commerce from a single merchandising and catalog data model.
  • Corporate IT and AI adoption. Run Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Palantir, and Claude Enterprise end-to-end, including help desk, AI rollout, governance, and organization-wide adoption.
  • Internal services and data pipelines. Build in Python, FastAPI, Supabase, Pandas, and SQL, including order, customer, and product migration workflows.
  • Operations and analytics. Use Retool & HTMX for operations interfaces, AfterShip for post-purchase, and Microsoft Fabric + Palantir Foundry for analytics.
  • Finance and infrastructure. Integrate NetSuite for finance and operate on Cloudflare with Datadog observability.
View the portfolio case
FIRST BOTTLE / COMMERCE
First Bottle wine storefront, showing a searchable catalog and product filters
First Bottle storefront · image from my professional portfolio

Explore the commerce portfolio.

Engineering in the open.

Source-linked engineering behind commerce and connected operations.

01 / SAASX2XLOCAL PILOT

Sovereign Source AI

For the people who make, move and sell.

A modular operations application connecting manufacturing, warehouse, commerce, finance, shipping, and publishing. Rust owns operational rules; Python supports validated data workflows and optional AI.

SaaSx2x manufacturing pilot showing the plant overview, production activity, and review queues
Manufacturing

Production activity, review queues, and plant notifications.

SaaSx2x warehouse pilot showing inventory, picking, and fulfillment operations with demo data
Warehouse

Inventory, picking, and fulfillment in one operations workspace.

Fieldwork demo storefront with a tote bag hero image, product collections, and featured products
Customer storefront

Collections and featured products in the Fieldwork demo store.

Local development screenshots with demo data. Select any image to enlarge.

View all seven screens
Explore the engineering decisions

Documented development slices cover customer order access, split fulfillment, shipment operations, shipping-cost review, and release recovery. Access boundaries, durable records, and human review are part of the design.

Local pilot using synthetic data. Live shipping and financial integrations remain development work. AI features are optional and disabled by default.

RUST · AXUM · PYDANTIC · POSTGRES
Explore the modules View source

DATAVA / CLIENT DELIVERY

Turning data platforms
into customer adoption.

Led 10 engineers delivering professional services for 15 financial-institution clients representing $2M ARR. Connected onboarding, roadmaps, resourcing, and go-live with CRM, loan pipelines, predictive analytics, and BI.

Explore the delivery work

CITIZEN SUCCESS / FOUNDER PROJECT

Public data,
made useful.

Built a civic data and publishing platform covering 48,000 politicians, with subscriptions, permissions, and self-hosted infrastructure.

Explore Citizen Success
Citizen Success interface with filters for state, party, role, and political office

HOW I WORK

Close to the business.
Close to the build.

I work across leadership, engineering, and operations. The job is to understand what needs to change, make a practical plan, and stay with it through adoption.

  1. 01

    Find the operating constraint.

    Start with the customer journey and the people doing the work. Map the data, handoffs, costs, and decisions.

  2. 02

    Prove the difficult connection.

    Use a focused proof of concept to expose integration limits and vendor dependencies before committing to the full roadmap.

  3. 03

    Make the change sustainable.

    Connect delivery with ownership, training, support, and measures the business can use.

02 / EXPERIENCE

A career at the intersection.

Full resume
First Bottle wine e-commerce storefront
Wine commerceDigital Beverage Group
Datava platform and financial institution clients from my portfolio
Data platformsDatava
The Daily Telegraph website shown in my News Corp portfolio case
News publishingNews Corp

2025–2026

Director of Technology & Operations

Digital Beverage Group / Last Bottle, Inc.

Commerce modernization, enterprise AI adoption, product and vendor delivery, and corporate IT. Promoted from Ecommerce Systems Administrator in August 2025.

COMMERCE

2024–PRESENT

CTO & Founder

Devekko

Digital and data strategy, full-stack development, and independent platforms including Citizen Success.

BUILDING

2022–2024

Technical Customer Success

Datava

Implementation Engineer, then Customer Success Manager. Led technical delivery and adoption for banking and credit union clients.

DATA + SAAS

2022

Senior Software Development Engineer

BrowserStack · Customer Engineering

Technical presales and solutions for web and mobile test automation.

QUALITY

2019–2022

Customer Success Engineer

Section.io

Global web performance and security. Onboarded 12 Toyota and Lexus domains and handled customer incidents across distributed cloud infrastructure.

RELIABILITY

2018–2019

Programming Project Manager

Sonic.com

Coordinated six developers and six systems administrators to deliver connectivity services, ACH payments, and customer tools.

DELIVERY

2014–2016

Drupal & WordPress Webmaster

California Institute for Regenerative Medicine · San Francisco, CA

Owned code, databases, content operations, and security for a government biotechnology agency’s 6,000+ page web estate with 15 content types. Coordinated vendors and a mobile-first redesign, managed the deployment lifecycle, and protected the agency’s sites against Drupal security vulnerabilities.

GOVERNMENT

2007

Technical Project Manager

Mantra Resorts / Guerrilla Marketing · Queensland, Australia

Led accommodation e-commerce delivery across three domains and 10,000+ content pages. Owned requirements, development, testing, launch, and operations, coordinating 10 developers across a nine-month delivery.

TRAVEL

2000–2003

Webmaster

News Corp / Nationwide News · Sydney, Australia

A key technical web resource for 30 news properties at News Corp headquarters. Delivered multimedia, web publishing, and e-commerce projects across editorial, advertising, marketing, IT, and executive teams. Supported publishing during major breaking-news events, including 9/11 and the Iraq War.

DIGITAL MEDIA

TOOLS I WORK WITH

Claude Enterprise / Python & SQL / Elixir & Phoenix / Rust & Axum / Shopify Plus / Linnworks / NetSuite / Microsoft Fabric / Palantir Foundry / Docker & Kubernetes / Cloudflare

03 / NOTES FROM THE WORK

Thinking in public.

All writing
TECHNOLOGY & RESILIENCE

The Digital Younger Dryas

A woolly mammoth, a changing digital environment, and six practical adaptations for businesses navigating shared technology risks.

 CYBERSECURITY & SYSTEMS

Cyberpolycrisis network map

A two-column infographic and sourced list of 26 cybersecurity topics, mapping shared credentials, AI tools, software delivery, certificate trust and recovery risks.

 CYBERSECURITY & RESILIENCE

The Cybersecurity Polycrisis

Eight case studies connecting cloud outages, AI security, software vulnerabilities, and digital trust—with a practical response plan for technology leaders.

 AI COMMERCE

Putting a Price on an Endpoint: x402 on FastAPI, in Detail

x402, FastAPI, and a staged approach to investment while demand is still emerging.

 AI COMMERCE

Status 402 Payment Required

What machine-to-machine payments mean for APIs, revenue, and technology leadership.

 APPLIED AI

Making an Ollama model release with Sky-T1-Flash for Cline

Configuring Sky-T1-Flash for Cline and learning the practical limits of local inference.

 MODERNIZATION

The Spike and the Steel Thread

A banking integration proof of concept, and what it revealed about scope and dependencies.

 GROWTH STRATEGY

Acquiring Growth With Counter-Cyclical Customer Success

Long-term modernization roadmaps and customer success through a market downturn.

 ECOMMERCE

Successful Ecommerce Projects

From requirements and catalog management to delivery, leadership, and sales metrics.

 PRODUCT DELIVERY

Agile and Waterfall: Myths and Realities

How daily Agile delivery fits within longer-term enterprise roadmaps.

 ENGINEERING

A local AI development workflow

Connecting Cursor, CodeGPT, Ollama, and GPU-enabled Docker containers. On niccolox.com.

LET’S BUILD WHAT COMES NEXT

Your next stage of growth
needs systems to match.

I’m interested in hands-on VP, CTO, and Director roles where AI transformation and technology operations connect directly to the business.

www.niccolox.com ↗LinkedIn ↗GitHub ↗Resume PDF ↓Resume Word ↓Portfolio PDF ↓