Nick Rodriquez

Hello, I'm

Nick
Rodriquez

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Years Solution Engineering Experience

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Years Customer Experience

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Average team growth

About

Building solutions, leading teams.

My passion is building and maintaining elite teams of technical sales and engineering resources who excel at the customized design, positioning, and delivery of outstanding business solutions. With a foundation of discipline from my military service, I lead teams to prioritize the success and enthusiasm of our customers and partners.

I'm currently focused on AI strategy with a security lens — architecting secure, agentic AI workflows and helping SE teams stay ahead of AI-orchestrated threats. I believe the most valuable players look beyond the mastery of their craft to how well they mentor others to mastery.

Leadership

Teams & orgs

Focus

Solutions Eng

Approach

Customer-first

Stack

Full-Stack AI First

Interests

Professional Interests

Solution Engineering

Translating complex technical capabilities into compelling customer narratives. Bridging the gap between product and market to drive meaningful outcomes.

Technical Leadership

Building and scaling high-performing pre-sales and solution engineering teams. Defining processes that enable consistent, repeatable execution.

Strategic Consulting

Advising organizations on go-to-market strategy, technical positioning, and how to win in competitive enterprise deals.

Career

Where I've been

Jan 2026 – Present

Senior Director, Solutions Engineering

Yubico · Remote

Scaling the technical sales organization and evolving the language of value for the modern AI-driven threat landscape. Architecting AI strategies for SE teams at the intersection of identity security and Generative AI. Building end-to-end agentic workflows using Claude Code and Gemini to automate the SE lifecycle. Supporting FIDO2 standards adoption across 150+ countries while mentoring the next generation of SEs to lead with technical excellence and an AI-first security posture.

Sep 2022 – Jan 2026

Director, Solutions Engineering

Yubico · Greater Seattle Area

Led solutions engineering for the world's leading hardware authentication company. Drove technical sales strategy, POC frameworks, and competitive positioning across enterprise accounts. Supported YubiKey and FIDO Universal 2nd Factor adoption for the world's largest organizations across 150+ countries.

Oct 2021 – Jul 2022

Senior Manager, Emerging Markets

Okta · Bellevue, WA

Led the emerging markets SE team focused on identity security and Zero Trust initiatives. Partnered closely with sales on discovery, POC design, and executive-level security reviews across the Pacific Northwest and emerging west region.

Jun 2021 – Oct 2021

Solutions Architect

Quantum · Seattle, WA

Solutions architecture role focused on enterprise data management and storage. Supported pre-sales technical requirements and customer solution design.

Mar 2012 – Dec 2020

Senior Systems Engineer → SE Manager

Commvault · Chicago, IL → Seattle, WA

Nearly 9-year tenure progressing from Key Accounts Senior SE to Systems Engineering Manager. As an individual contributor, was the #1 revenue-generating SE in the Chicago Enterprise district (FY2014) and grew accounts from $0 to $2.4M. As manager, led pre-sales SE teams across the West covering enterprise, SLED, and healthcare — managing RFPs, POC playbooks, demo standards, and competitive positioning.

Earlier Career

IT Leadership, Pre-Sales & Military Service

Various · Chicago, IL & New Orleans, LA

Built a deep technical foundation across multiple roles: Pre-Sales Engineer at Integrated Data Storage (Chicago); Director of IT and Senior Systems Engineer at PayFlex Systems; Senior Network Administrator at REAL Watersports; and F-15 Weapons Systems Armament Specialist in the Air National Guard (1999–2006). Military service instilled the discipline and focus that underpins my leadership approach today.

Blog

Latest writing

All posts →
The New SE: How AI Is Redefining Solution Engineering and Forward-Deployed Roles

June 8, 2026

The New SE: How AI Is Redefining Solution Engineering and Forward-Deployed Roles

The role of the Solution Engineer is undergoing its most significant transformation in decades. Not because the job is being replaced — but because AI is amplifying what was always the hardest part: bridging the gap between what a product does and what a customer needs. The best SE teams I've seen operate from a shared set of operating principles — not aspirations on a wall, but real decision-making frameworks. Things like putting the customer first, bias for action, work together-not alone, and do what you say you are going to do. These principles have always defined great SE work. What's changed is that AI finally gives SE's the leverage to actually live them at scale.

The Tower of Babel Had No Audit Log

May 27, 2026

The Tower of Babel Had No Audit Log

Pope Leo XIV's encyclical Magnifica Humanitas (May 15, 2026) is a sweeping document — part moral philosophy, part social doctrine, part urgent warning about AI. For those of us building infrastructure for agentic AI systems, it deserves a close read. Not because we need papal approval, but because the Pope is asking exactly the right questions.

April 29, 2026

An AI agent deleted a company's production database in 9 seconds. The fix isn't a smarter model — it's hardware in the loop.

Last Friday, Cursor — running Claude Opus 4.6 — wiped PocketOS's production database and every volume-level backup in a single API call. The agent's own post-mortem: "I violated every principle I was given." I work in authentication at Yubico, so I read this with a specific question: at what point in those 9 seconds should something have stopped it, and what would "something" actually look like?

Contact

Let's connect

Whether it's a new opportunity, a project, or just a conversation — let's connect on LinkedIn.

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