Nathan Harkenrider

Nathan Harkenrider is the Senior Director of Engineering at Smartsheet. Nathan has been with the company since September 2013, and in their current role, they lead a team of nearly 100 engineers who are responsible for Smartsheet's core platform, enterprise enablement, and governance capabilities. This includes the sheet "engine" and storage services, authentication and authorization, user administration, and cloud infrastructure.

Nathan's teams are focused on continuous improvement to availability, reliability, and performance, architecting for enterprise scale, managing cloud infrastructure across multiple regions, and decomposing monolithic components into standalone services.

Prior to joining Smartsheet, Nathan was the Director of Engineering at Optify, where they also served as the system architect. At Optify, they drove early prototyping of new technologies that were later leveraged for some of the most popular features of the product. Nathan also set standards for SOA design and architecture to ensure consistency in design and implementation across all Optify services.

Nathan has a track record of collaborating with executive leadership, product management, and operations teams to drive change and improve efficiency. For example, while at Optify they worked closely with the Operations team to move from a Scrum process that involved monthly deployments, to a Kanban model that enabled the team to deploy code weekly. This change greatly improved internal visibility into the product development pipeline.

Nathan is known for focusing on removing roadblocks and obstacles to ensure that

Nathan Harkenrider has a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Seattle University. Nathan also has a certification from Coursera in Functional Programming Principles in Scala.

Some of their coworkers include Ben Canning - Vice President of Product Management, Mahesh Guruswamy - Senior Director of Engineering, and David Pessis - Vice President of Product. Their manager is Praerit Garg, Chief Product Officer & EVP, Engineering.