Nick Ashley
nick@nickashley.dev • 319.594.3668
Professional Profile
Technical Co-Founder & Senior Software Engineer with 17+ years of experience building and scaling a profitable SaaS platform from inception to $1.6M ARR. Expert in the Laravel/TALL stack with a proven track record of leading high-stakes architectural merges, complex financial integrations, and modernizing legacy systems. Proven track record of creating high-velocity, AI-augmented development workflows that prioritize code maintainability, system reliability, and business-driven technical decisions.
Technical Expertise
Laravel
PHP
SQL
Livewire
Alpine.js
Tailwind CSS
Stripe
Laravel Horizon
Professional Experience
Co-Founder & Lead Engineer
NurseRecruiter.com | 2008 - 2025
- Built and scaled a bootstrapped SaaS platform to $1.6M ARR, serving as the sole technical owner across product strategy, system architecture, UX/design, and full-stack execution.
- Designed and continuously evolved a long-lived production platform, modernizing the architecture with Laravel and a component-driven frontend to enable rapid iteration, custom integrations, and scalable feature development.
- Engineered high-traffic search and recommendation engine connecting nurses with job opportunities, optimizing queries, indexing, and caching to deliver fast, relevant results at scale.
- Established engineering standards and culture, mentoring developers in Laravel best practices, testing, and building maintainable, production-ready systems.
Education
Bachelor of Arts in Computer Science – University of Iowa, 2005