About
Aaron Wise, MBA, MSIA
Dynamic technology executive with a strong track record of leveraging advanced technologies, automation, and strategic planning to address complex business challenges and drive organizational growth. Known for leading successful platform transformations and modernization initiatives, I excel at fostering collaboration, breaking down silos, and building high-performing technical teams. My leadership style emphasizes innovation and best practices in management, resulting in scalable information architectures and secure, AI-powered platforms. As a curious engineer with a keen eye on industry trends, I thrive at the intersection of business and technology, supporting start-ups, scale-ups, and established companies alike.
BlackCloak | Orlando, FL (remote)
Cybersecurity platform offering bespoke, privacy-first solutions for enterprises and high-net-worth individuals.
Chief Technology Officer
Vice President of Engineering
2022 – Oct 2024
2021 – 2022
Drive technical vision, product strategy, and innovation as part of the Executive Leadership Team, leading the engineering org through a platform transformation that led to a successful Series A capital raise and a current Series B round.
- Conceptualize and execute a comprehensive business technology strategy, blending innovation with business acumen to drive the success of a $2M product development, platform architecture, and engineering organization.
- Created and communicated product and technical road maps to internal and external stakeholders, leveraging data, customer discovery, and user feedback to progress value recognition and business outcomes.
- Introduced MACH architecture for faster response to the evolving business needs associated with rapid scaling.
- Bolstered responsiveness by 50% via transition to distributed cloud infrastructure and containerized services.
- Strategized and created a research and development function to maximize investment and product evolution through rapid prototyping and trends-based development that positioned the platform ahead of the curve.
- Establish and expand a geographically dispersed, multicultural, integrated product and engineering organization, doubling the team and introducing a leadership layer to enhance capacity and operational efficiency.
- Grew product and engineering teams from four to 15 with the projection to scale to 25 in 2024 and 45 in 2025.
- Enhanced team capabilities by creating dedicated product, QA, UI, UX, DevOps, and data engineering roles.
- Led org-wide shift to Agile, introducing best practices and internal tools to enable growth from 12 to ~50 staff.
- Recalibrated the tech stack, introducing telemetry, software supply chain security, and observability to strengthen the security, field serviceability, and mobile and desktop performance.
- Championed a privacy-first, secure-by-design approach to protect user data and enhance security posture.
- Centralized data platforms and created data governance protocol to support scalable AI and ML pipelines.
- Reduced app store dependency by 60% via configuration-based architecture patterns and OTA updates that simultaneously reduced business risk associated with excessive vendor and app store reviews.
- Enhanced operational efficiency and reduced cost by consolidating internal tooling platforms and automating processes, decreasing manual toil and alleviating redundancies across product and engineering teams.
- Evaluated and implemented hyper-automation patterns and practices to optimize business processes while leveraging AI and ML models, automation, and process discovery to elevate the user experience.
- Partnered with engineering management to evaluate and introduce AI-augmented development and QA process.
ZeroNorth | Boston, MA
B2B security orchestration platform revolutionizing security integration and data security for enterprise build pipelines.
Vice President of Engineering
2019 – 2021
Advanced from a technical individual contributor into a sales and engineering-focused executive role driving software and data innovations, team restructuring, and transformative growth to position the company for acquisition by Hardness.io.
- Restructured and energized engineering teams by implementing Agile methodologies and establishing a two-team sprint structure that improved feature delivery and created a transparent SDLC process.
- Cut technical debt and reduced AWS spending by 25%.
- Developed technical roadmaps to boost cycle times and drive cohesion across IT, InfoSec, Engineering, and QA.
Director of Engineering
2018 – 2019
- Spearheaded the growth of the engineering team from 4 to 20 staff to increase capacity and lay the foundation for product scaling and long-term platform growth.
- Instituted a formal mentoring framework to accelerate individual development and streamline onboarding.
- Partnered with sales and customer success teams to facilitate PoC, due diligence, and architectural reviews.
Principal Software/Data Engineer
2017 – 2018
- Drove the development of Python and NodeJS-based data engineering solutions while liaising with executive leadership to provide status updates and actionable insights based on real-time data analysis and reporting.
- Designed and implemented 50% of the platform’s DAST and SAST security tooling automation.
- Built vital security integrations such as data normalization, ingestion, containerized ZAP, and CI/CD pipelines.
- Integrated data normalization and ingestion using Python and NodeJS.
Grantham, Mayo, Van Otterloo (GMO) | Boston, MA
U.S.-based financial asset management firm building and leveraging proprietary investment research data platforms.
Technical Lead, Lead Developer
2013 – 2017
- Led a ten-staff engineering team building novel methods to support ETL and data engineering processes for large bitemporal time series data streams used to inform investment decision-making for $150B in AUM.
Monster Worldwide (Monster.com) | Cambridge, MA
Global online employment solution for people seeking jobs and employers looking for candidates.
Senior Security Architect
2010 – 2012
- Responsible for research and remediation of zero-day vulnerabilities.
- Designed and built core security functionality used by the entire engineering team.
- Performed secure code reviews and worked with QA and engineering to remediate findings.
Monster Worldwide (Monster.com) | Maynard, MA
Global online employment solution for people seeking jobs and employers looking for candidates.
Senior Database Engineer
2007 – 2010
- Responsible for data modeling and engineering for new features at scale.
- Process development and internal tool creation for source code reviews and zero downtime deployments.
Education
| Boston College | Master of Business Administration (concentration in Finance, Machine Learning, Entrepreneurship) |
| Norwich University | Master of Science, Information Assurance (MSIA) |
| University of Central Florida | Bachelor of Science, Management Information Systems (MIS) |
Technologies
- Strategy
- Mutually Exclusive Collectively Exhaustive (MECE)
- Logic/Issue Trees
- Porter’s Five Forces
- Backcasting
- SWOT
- Stakeholder Alignment
- Value Chain
- Growth-Share Matrix
- Investment Map
- Technology Radar
- Info & App Sec
- Supply chain risk
- Digital immune system
- Security orchestration
- API security testing
- Static (SAST) and Dynamic (DAST) Security Testing
- Open source software security
- Software license management
- Cloud & Platform Architecture
- Volatility-based decomposition (VBD)
- MACH (Microservices-Based, API-First, Cloud-Native, and Headless)
- Poly cloud architecture
- Distributed computing
- Distributed tracing
- Observability
- Configuration-based design
- High Availability (HA)
Database and Information Architecture:
- Data program and platform design
- Data governance
- Data lakehouse
- Artificial Intelligence (AI)
- Machine Learning (ML)
- Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)
- Time series
- Bitemporal database design
- Data gravity
- Data locality
- Data pipelines
- Workload analysis
Courses
- AI Product Management Specialization – Duke University
- Data-Driven Decision Making (DDDM) – State University of NY
- Ethereum Dev Bootcamp – Alchemy University
- Learn Solidity – Alchemy University
- Harvard Alumni Entrepreneurs – Web3 Bootcamp
Thought Leadership
- U.S. Patent 11783051 – Normalization, compression, and correlation of vulnerabilities
Industries
- Security
- Finance/Quantitative/Institutional Investments
- Big Tech
- Biotech
- FinTech