Why I joined Nitric

If you told me a year ago that I’d leave a stable, well-paying job in the financial services industry - one with regular promotions, a predictable trajectory, and a clear ladder - to jump ship into a startup trying to reinvent infrastructure delivery, I would have laughed you off and gone back to updating my Jira tickets while on mute in Teams.

But here we are.

I left a large, highly regulated, multi-cloud, many-layered insurance firm - one of those places where provisioning a resource takes months, approvals require full documentation for things that might not even get built, and a failed pipeline is less risky than a Slack typo. And I left all that comfort and certainty to join a small team with a big vision: Nitric.

Why?

Because the way we build and ship infrastructure today is broken. And I was tired of being part of the problem.

The Problem With Infra Today

In large organisations, infrastructure is treated like nuclear power: complex, heavily regulated, and dangerous in the wrong hands. And for good reason - the cost of doing it wrong can be massive, especially when your cloud bill runs into seven figures per month, and your applications handle sensitive financial data.

So you get endless layers of abstraction, approval gates, domain silos, and fragile pipelines that all exist to mitigate risk. But in doing so, they also kill speed, ownership, and - most critically - developer autonomy.

In theory, devops; "you build it, you run it." In practice? You build it, then open a service request, fill out a spreadsheet, wait three weeks, get rejected for using the wrong tagging convention, try again, then finally deploy to a broken staging environment that hasn't been updated since the last Olympics.

This isn’t just frustrating. It’s systemic.

Developers are burdened with understanding deeply nested infrastructure patterns, writing boilerplate IaC (Infrastructure as Code) for every CRUD resource, and navigating approval processes that feel more like legal arbitration than software delivery. And while infra teams try to maintain standards, what we actually get is a ton of shadow IT, snowflake configurations, and a rising cognitive tax that slows down everyone.

The dream of platform engineering - one interface, endorsed patterns, fast delivery, clear security posture - is still largely that: a dream.

That's where Nitric comes in

So why did I join a startup?

Because Nitric is trying to fix all of this. And not in a “we built another Terraform wrapper” way.

Nitric is tackling the heart of the problem: How do we make infrastructure accessible and safe for developers - without requiring them to become cloud experts or wait weeks for approvals?

It’s about breaking down the barriers between app code and the infrastructure that powers it. About moving from “Infrastructure as Code” to “Infrastructure as Context” - generating just what you need based on intent, not boilerplate.

We’re building abstractions that are:

• Powerful enough for platform teams to control governance and compliance
• Simple enough for developers to request and use infra without needing to learn the inner workings of cloud providers
• Flexible enough to evolve with the organisation, not become a brittle point of failure

And we’re doing this in a way that recognises the actual software delivery lifecycle in large organisations - where most of the time isn't spent writing code, but in getting sign-off from architects, security, and infra teams.

The Exciting Bit

What’s exciting here isn’t just the tech - it’s the shift in mindset.

Most tools today assume that speed is the bottleneck. But in the enterprise, approval is the bottleneck. Getting to production is about navigating policy, governance, and trust.

Nitric isn’t just faster - it’s aligned. Aligned to the way large orgs think, but optimised to eliminate the pain. It's about designing opinionated defaults that let you fly through the process with confidence.

It’s about giving platform teams the visibility and control they need, without forcing devs to speak YAML-as-a-second-language. And it's about evergreen infrastructure - infra that evolves with you, not something you dread touching a year later.

Why I Jumped

So yeah, I left a cushy job with months of lead time and 3 levels of risk assessment. I left meetings where we argued about the shade of purple to use in a PowerPoint. I left my Internet Explorer-compatible timesheet tool where the text was 40% in German.

And I joined a small team with big dreams and no illusions about how messy real-world software delivery is.

Because I genuinely believe that we can make infrastructure a launchpad for bold ideas, and not a dreaded ticket pushed out for another sprint.

And maybe - just maybe - we can make devops a lived reality.

One More Thing

If you’ve ever built a "platform" inside a big org, you already know: half the challenge is the tech, the other half is getting anyone to use it. Nitric is trying to solve both. We're making infra simple, compliant, and composable. And we're making it developer-first without ignoring the platform team's reality.

That’s why I joined. And I’m betting big on it.

If that sounds interesting to you - or painfully familiar - let’s talk. (https://www.addsuga.com/)[https://www.addsuga.com/]