End User Onboarding
Circle
The public API partners integrate to onboard their own end users onto Circle products. Covers the full KYB application lifecycle so partners can embed onboarding directly in their platforms.
Nicholas Pate
Platform Architecture · API Design · Applied AI · Engineering Leadership
01 / About
Platform work, measured by what others build on it
Platform-focused staff engineer whose work is measured less by what ships directly and more by what other teams can build on top of it.
I own architecture and technical direction for Circle's onboarding platform, the system Circle customers onboard through. I delivered the partner-facing API that extends it to external integrators, and founded the AI service that took LLM automation from prototype into production compliance workflows.
I set engineering standards adopted across the org, partner with Product and Compliance on scope and ambiguity, and grow engineers who carry large changes on their own.
02 / Skills
Core skills
Applied AI
Platform and APIs
Fintech and Crypto
Languages
Cloud and Infra
Data
Leadership
03 / Experience
Professional experience
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Circle
Staff Software Engineer
- Own technical direction for Circle's onboarding platform, evolving one-off integrations into a scalable, template-driven system, and established the standards, patterns and documentation other teams now build against.
- Built Circle's first in-house client onboarding platform, a templated data-collection API that replaced manual processes and onboards every Circle customer today.
- Led the design, build and launch of Circle's End User Onboarding product, the public API partners integrate to onboard their own end users onto Circle products, covering the full KYB application lifecycle so partners can embed onboarding directly in their own platforms.
- Made new onboarding flows configuration-driven, cutting time-to-launch and making the platform genuinely self-serve. Adjacent teams now launch flows with no platform engineering involvement.
- Founded and lead the team's AI service, taking AI from prototype to production business automation, with AI-driven checks now running inside compliance workflows.
- Shape company-wide engineering practice: Java standards, AI code-review guidance, design review and architecture committees, plus developer-experience and operational reliability improvements well beyond team scope.
- Bridge Engineering, Product, Compliance and Design, shaping scope, resolving ambiguous requirements across onboarding and KYC/KYB, and aligning target experience against platform constraints.
- Mentor engineers and hand off ownership of major refactors and new services, so the team ships large changes without single-threaded dependency on any one person.
- Directed a cross-functional engineering team building the USDC Rewards product from concept to production.
- Lead incident response and on-call rotations: fast fixes, clear communication and production hygiene under time pressure.
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Aspen Capital
Staff Software Engineer
- Led re-architecture from Azure to lower-cost, scalable AWS services. An earlier on-prem to Azure migration and resource right-sizing cut spend by $50k+ per month.
- Designed a generic PDF generation system on Spring Boot, iText and Spring Data JPA that processed tens of thousands of documents in minutes, 100x faster than the process it replaced.
- Rewrote a legacy Node.js service in Spring Boot with full unit and integration coverage, reducing runtime from 3 hours to 3 minutes.
- Built Aspen's first external API for loss mitigation on Spring Boot, Spring Data JPA and OIDC, plus a Twilio IVR payment integration for customer support.
- Interviewed and hired across Engineering, DevOps, QA, DBA, Data Engineering and Management.
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ImageWare Systems Inc.
Lead Full Stack Software Engineer
- Moved Spring Boot and Node services off virtual machines onto Docker and Kubernetes, with CI pipelines deploying to AWS ECS/Fargate.
- Built IotDNA, a Spring Boot REST microservice for biometric identification of IoT devices, using OAuth2, Hibernate, Swagger, Docker and JUnit.
- Rebuilt the product front end in Vue.js, Vuex and Vuetify in two months, reaching a SonarQube "A" rating across 10k lines with zero bugs or code smells.
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Earlier experience
Stack Sports
formerly Bonzi Technology / Blue Star Sports
Director of Software Engineering · Full Stack Engineer
- Grew with the company from startup to a SaaS platform serving 5M+ active users and thousands of sports organizations, owning architecture, infrastructure, delivery and engineering leadership. Bonzi was acquired by Blue Star Sports in 2016 as its first acquisition, later becoming Stack Sports.
- Built Blue Star Pay, a RESTful payment platform processing $100M+ annually across multiple payment processors.
- Led migration from Oracle RAC to Postgres: consolidated 300+ redundant schemas, migrated 50GB+ of data and refactored thousands of files, delivered in 3 months.
04 / Work
Selected work
Production AI Service
Circle
Founded and lead the service that took LLM automation from prototype to production. AI-driven checks now run inside compliance workflows.
Blue Star Pay
Stack Sports
A RESTful payment platform processing $100M+ annually across multiple payment processors for thousands of sports organizations.
IotDNA
ImageWare Systems
A Spring Boot REST microservice for biometric identification of IoT devices, letting anonymous devices be validated before joining a network.
05 / Education
Education
B.S. Computer Science
Oregon State University
06 / Contact
Let's talk
Happy to talk platform architecture, API design, or putting AI to work on real workflows.