About

Nat Hillard is a Digital Services Expert at United States Digital Service, with over 12 years of experience in software engineering and management. He has a strong background in iOS and full-stack web development, and has shipped software to hundreds of millions of users, ranging from C-based system daemons to frameworks, interfaces, apps, and language models. Nat believes in the power of fair, inclusive, collaborative teams to do and make great things, and has spent his career realizing this vision. He focuses on continuous improvement for himself and the teams and people he works with, and believes that frequent and open communication and collaboration lead to fairness, inclusivity, and transparency. At United States Digital Service, Nat has worked on several projects, including engineering lead for the Claims Attributes API at the Department of Veterans Affairs, architecting an analytics engine in GCP and AWS for COVID-19 Exposure Notifications in Colorado, drafting major contributions to the USDR Vaccine Provider Guide at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and crafting data pipelines, infrastructure, and a React frontend for a map-based tool at the Environmental Protection Agency. In his past roles at Spotify, Nat oversaw and mentored teams of frontend, backend, and machine learning engineers, supervised delivery for project teams, managed ongoing migration of technical stack, and shipped apps to tens of millions of users on various platforms. He also conducted extensive hiring and outreach for full-time hires and contractors, and co-facilitated department-wide hack days and hack weeks. Nat holds a B.A.S. in Symbolic Systems and Chinese from Stanford University and studied Modern Chinese History, Historical and Sociolinguistics at the University of Oxford. He is proficient in various technologies, including ML, AWS, GCP, Ruby, and iOS, and has experience in data engineering, microservices, and language models.