About

Jim Nist is a second-generation engineering and product leader with almost 30 years of experience. He is currently the Director of Engineering at Sonder Inc., a rapidly growing hospitality brand that provides unique experiences with a consistent level of quality. Jim's teams build products that empower the discovery and selection of the perfect Sonder experience for each and every guest, across sonder.com and other distribution channels. With 24/7 on-demand service, crisp linens, and over 200 other quality standards, Sonder is taking stay further for guests all around the world at an accessible price point. Jim is responsible for driving a distributed engineering organization that builds the next great hospitality brand. Prior to Sonder, Jim was the VP of Product Development at Liftopia, Inc., where he reduced the team by half and streamlined processes while radically increasing productivity and cooperation within the team and with other departments. A focus on a smaller integrated product development team enabled Jim and his team to innovate quickly on the product and better support features that partners and consumers want while supporting integrations with partner systems. He successfully deployed appropriate technologies for actual business problems, which all but eliminated unplanned downtime on a complicated system that provides e-commerce to both white label partner stores and a marketplace. Jim has a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Fine Art, Computer Science, and English from the University of Colorado Boulder. He has also attended Gonzaga College High School. Jim is a senior software engineer with expertise in Spark, JavaScript, iOS, Ruby, and React Native. He has a keen interest in business-driven technology solutions and people skills. Jim's specialties include penmanship, which he honed during his formative years doodling on punch cards and chewing on "THINK" pencils. Jim is always looking for rock stars to help build products that enable incredible offline experiences in the world's most amazing cities. He is passionate about what he does and is committed to building products that make a difference in people's lives.