About

Viam inveniam, aut faciam.

(I’ll find a way, or I’ll make one.)

I’m Nik Ogura — a distinguished engineer, CIO, and infrastructure architect based in San Diego County. I build secure, scalable platforms and the teams that run them. My career spans nearly two decades of designing and operating systems at the intersection of infrastructure, security, and software delivery.

KATN Solutions

In 2025 I founded KATN Solutions, an infrastructure, security, and DevOps consulting practice. KATN operates on a force-multiplier model: I architect systems, build them out, establish engineering standards, train the team, and hand off ownership. The goal is enterprise-grade infrastructure without permanent dependence on outside help.

What I Do

My core expertise is in distributed systems and open source. I’ve been building distributed infrastructure since long before Kubernetes existed — by hand, from scratch. One of the reasons I like Kubernetes so much is how well it handles the distributed systems problems I spent years solving manually. These days I work across the full stack: Kubernetes, observability, security, GitOps, and Go. I design platforms that run in cloud, on-prem, and air-gapped environments. I build the tooling, automation, and security controls that let engineering teams ship with confidence. When something doesn’t exist yet, I build it.

Career Highlights

At Terrace, I was elevated from Director of Cloud Infrastructure and Security to CIO and Head of Engineering, where I re-architected the entire platform from database to front-end, cutting latencies from 600ms to microseconds and scaling data handling by over 100x. I launched the flagship product in under three months.

At AWS, I worked on FedRamp compliance automation for Amazon Global Accelerator and developed Kubernetes Operators for the Web Application Firewall.

At Orion Labs, I led infrastructure as Head of Infrastructure, building a Kubernetes platform for secure voice communications across cloud, on-prem, and air-gapped deployments, and developed contact tracing systems during Covid.

At Scribd, I founded and led the Security Team, built a scalable SIEM, implemented WAF protections, and created the open source Managed Secrets project for Hashicorp Vault.

At Stitch Fix, I built identity and access systems for the Algorithms and Analytics department.

At Apple, I led Apple Pay DevOps, architected the command and control system for global launch in China across 30k servers, and built Apple Pay’s first automated CI/CD system.

Open Source

I maintain several open source projects listed in Awesome-Go, including Dynamic Binary Toolkit and Go Mason. Other projects include Managed Secrets, K8S Cluster Manager, and NamedReturns, a Go linter enforcing named returns.

For my full professional history, see my resume. Find me on GitHub.