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Nick VidalLet's talk

Hi, I'm Nick · AI solutions & enablement

I like figuring things out.Especially when it makes someone's day easier.

I build AI tools, connect systems, and automate the work that keeps getting in people's way. Then I stick around and help people put it to use.

See what I've builtLet's talk

Based in New Mexico · Looking for my next remote team

Selected work

The first is from my most recent job. The rest I built on my own time: one for my own job search, and two for people I wanted to help.

The HRMLESS Trust Center: SOC 2 Type II and 33 controls, the audit period and auditor, and AI fairness results including a Satisfactory NIST AI RMF 1.0 rating.
The public Trust Center, November 2026. Its figures come live from the compliance platform.

Professional work · Principal AI Engineer at HRMLESS · 2026

Giving AI agents safe access to real company systems

HRMLESS is an HR technology company. Its AI needed to reach internal systems safely, and its customers needed proof that the setup was secure and fair. I owned that work from requirements and architecture through deployment and troubleshooting in production.

What I did

  • Built MCP services in Python that let AI agents use internal systems, with role-based permissions, scoped tokens, and an audit trail.
  • Connected the compliance platform to the public Trust Center, so what customers see comes straight from the system of record.
  • Automated audit evidence collection with Python, so nobody had to gather it by hand before every review.

Result: I led the SOC 2 Type II audit across 33 controls to a clean report, and the AI governance program I designed was rated Satisfactory in an independent NIST AI RMF 1.0 assessment in July 2026.

Also: single sign-on with Keycloak and Entra ID, secrets in Vault, Kubernetes, PostgreSQL, Redis, and observability tooling. The code and architecture stay with the company.

The ZeroHour Times front page: a newspaper-style layout listing five job postings with apply or explore verdicts, and a featured posting with its rating and reasoning.
The front page, built from the project's demo data. Every company and posting shown is fictional.

Personal project · Open source · 2026

The ZeroHour Times: a job search that doesn't flatter you

The first version of my AI job matcher was a flatterer. It rated nearly every role 85 to 92, including one whose own analysis admitted the core work wasn't in my background. So I rebuilt it to be honest, and to print a daily front page I can read with coffee.

What I did

  • Pulls new openings from public job boards and hands them to the open-source JobSync tracker through its MCP interface.
  • Makes the model back every skill match with a quote. If the job's main requirement isn't backed up, code caps the score, not the model.
  • Runs in Docker with a hard daily spending cap, plus a demo mode anyone can try without an API key.

Result: On a deliberately tricky test set, it turned down 12 of 12 roles it should have: engineering jobs, junior titles, non-remote roles, and roles needing credentials the candidate didn't have.

I designed, tested, and documented it, with Claude and Cursor doing a lot of the typing.

Two free guides for people starting something new

The Veteran Transition Roadmap home page, headed 'Map Your Military Experience to AI + Cybersecurity,' with a Start Your Assessment button.

Free resource I built

Veteran Transition Roadmap

Military experience is real experience, but it doesn't come with civilian job titles attached. This two-minute assessment asks about your role, years of service, leadership level, and interests, then lays out a 90-day plan for moving into AI and cybersecurity work.

I designed it, wrote the content, and built the site. It's free and needs no account.

The student guide home page, headed 'Cyber & AI Careers for Portales High School Students,' with buttons for cyber domains, AI and automation careers, and starting without college.

Free resource I built

A tech career guide for Portales students

A plain-language guide for high school students in my area who are curious about cybersecurity and AI. It covers four starting paths, AI and automation careers, and how to get started without a four-year degree, plus a page for parents and teachers.

I wrote it and built the site. It's an independent project, not a school program.

What I do on a team

Usually in this order, though real projects loop back more than diagrams admit.

  1. Step 1

    Understand the problem

    I talk with the people doing the work, map how it actually flows, and find where it gets stuck.

    At Ramstein I built an IT request tracker that showed what came in, who owned it, and where it stood. Wait time dropped by 832 hours a year.

  2. Step 2

    Build the solution

    AI workflows, APIs, integrations, automation, and the infrastructure they run on. I use AI coding tools heavily, and I'm accountable for what ships.

    I was doing this before AI tools made it easier: a document routing system that cut processing time 80%, and a supervisor-change tracker that saved 703 hours a year.

  3. Step 3

    Help it work in practice

    Documentation, training, feedback, and follow-through. A tool nobody uses didn't help anyone.

    I've trained 191 site and process owners through a SharePoint migration, and led 16 resiliency workshops for 214 people.

Working with me

I'm comfortable not knowing things yet. A lot of my best work started with a basic question and someone patient enough to answer it, so I try to return the favor. I share what I figure out, write it down, and pull people in early enough that their input still changes something.

The teams I do best on share what they know, let people ask a basic question without it getting weird, and care enough to say when something could be better. Bonus points if you can laugh when the thing you were sure would work doesn't.

On my own time I build free things for people at the start of something: veterans figuring out where their experience fits, and students in my town wondering whether tech is for them. Technology means the most to me when it helps someone get to steadier ground.

Before that: 20 years in the Air Force

Mostly IT and cybersecurity, starting in systems administration and moving through team supervision, program management, and senior staff work. It's where I learned to train people, coordinate groups that don't report to each other, and deliver on someone else's deadline.

  • 164 tasks

    clarified when I rebuilt a training program for two career specialties. Training time dropped by 12 hours.

  • 172 people

    in the cyber and IT organization where I helped set up the new staff office and wrote how it coordinates work.

  • Vice chair

    of the cyber career field's working group on quality assurance and standardization, contributing to its training plan.

If your team is working on making technology more useful to people, I'd like to hear about it.

Email is the easiest way to reach me.

vidal@nicholasvidal.tech