Behind the Growth of Nitrogen’s Systems: Insights from Dan Getz, Principal Engineer

As one of Nitrogen’s earliest software engineers, Dan Getz, now Principal Engineer, has witnessed firsthand the remarkable growth of our technology and systems over the past decade. What began as a simple product offering a single portfolio view with a risk questionnaire has evolved into a comprehensive wealth management platform, featuring accounts, portfolio analytics, stress tests, investment research, and more. As Nitrogen expanded its offerings, the underlying technology had to scale and adapt in tandem. Dive into the journey of Nitrogen’s technical evolution through the eyes of Dan Getz.

Back in 2013, we had two engineers and neither a customer support department nor a quality assurance department. All employees handled customer support, and engineers did their own testing. Once an engineer felt comfortable with their code, they would ship it to production and then do a quick follow-up test in production. If it failed, that meant a few panicked minutes where we would quickly undo the changes. Our infrastructure was simpler, with a virtual server for each segment of the application.

Back then, most of our code was written in either PHP or JavaScript. We used Matlab to calculate portfolio analytics. While this worked, PHP had some limitations that were holding us back and our process for using Matlab with a web application was so fragile that we had an emergency process that we could use to get us back up and running, just in case.

As we looked to the future, one of the first changes we made was exploring the programming language Node.js. Node.js allowed us to innovate in two significant ways. First, Node.js could process some tasks much more efficiently than PHP. Second, Node.js allows multithreading, which means that we can process some tasks in parallel instead of one at a time. Using Node.js, we built the first version of our import pipeline that powered the product that would later become Command Center.

We believe in using the right tool for the problem, which means that to continue innovating, we reevaluate our tech stack from time to time, growing it as needed. This led us to replace Matlab with the programming languages R and Python, both of which have a strong math focus. Python is particularly well-known among software engineers and is also extensively used to power many statistics and web-based applications.

Our innovation didn’t stop with just growth in programming languages. We also built out integrations and worked with partners to allow them to build integrations with Nitrogen. Moving data around and supporting single sign-on (SSO) meant new patterns and new research. We implemented an OAuth-based API and supported SAML for inbound SSO. Our early integrations focused on account data, giving our users the power of the Risk Number without having to hand-enter all of their clients’ holdings.

As we continued to grow, (and added amazing teams of customer care and quality assurance people) our processes and infrastructure also grew. Code reviews and dedicated quality assurance engineers allowed us to decrease the chance of a system outage and to catch edge cases before they made it into our product. New infrastructure patterns such as containerization allowed us to scale resources up and down as needed.

We still haven’t stopped innovating. We’ve implemented data warehouse technology to power our custodial data imports and Command Center. We’ve researched and implemented search engine systems to power Research Center. Risk Center is powered by technologies that allow us to return calculations faster, and we’ve embraced generative AI with the launch of Nitrogen AI. We’ve done all of this to create powerful solutions for top wealth management firms to use directly with their clients.

Over the past decade, I’ve seen a lot of growth in our engineering team, our technical systems, and the features that we can offer you. I’m excited about what we have in the pipeline and can’t wait to deliver even more wealth management platform innovation and value to financial advisors.