About Me
Howdy, I'm Caine Nielsen — a software engineer, lifelong learner, and someone who's been building, hacking, and inventing since the moment I was allowed to play with Legos.
I was born in Murray, Utah on July 31st, 1997. That makes me 27 years, 341 days, 20 hours, and 55 minutes old. My early life was shaped by my dad's career in the U.S. Navy. Our family moved up and down the coasts — California, Florida, Washington, Maine — and I fell in love with the ocean and the feeling of always discovering something new. My parents raised me and my three younger brothers with a sense of adventure, independence, and curiosity — values that have stuck with me ever since.
Today, I live in Lehi, Utah with my beautiful wife and my son Tyson, we have two cats and a crazy dog. We spend time doing home improvement projects, keeping things clean, and hanging out with our friends, family, and neighbors. We enjoy time alone to read, work on personal projects, and enjoy nature, and we love taking family trips together.
From the start, I've been drawn to technology as a means of creativity. I might not have known exactly what it meant to be an "engineer" or "inventor" back then, but I knew I wanted to build cool things! — things that made people say, "Whoa, how'd you do that?" By middle school, I was exploring online games and hacking my own experience — cracking music, tweaking settings, automating repetitive tasks — all on my dad's old laptop. I was hooked.
In high school, I doubled down. I took every technical class I could find: programming, graphic design, desktop publishing, drafting and 3D modeling with AutoCAD. Technology felt like magic I could control — and I wanted to learn it all.
After graduation, I worked a string of jobs — from retail to my first office gig on the sales floor at Clearlink. It wasn't deeply technical, but I soaked up everything I could about ISPs, networking, caching, and systems thinking. That mindset helped me land roles in technical support and internal IT, where I managed devices, key card systems, Salesforce automations, and more. Eventually, I landed at Banyan, where I stayed for three years. It was there I got my first hands-on experience with engineering teams: writing SQL reports, updating websites, organizing infrastructure, and helping automate the work of sales and marketing teams.
My first full-time development role came at Pura, and it was a game-changer. I went from automation and light scripting to full-stack development and core product engineering. I helped maintain and scale our device control platform — fixing bugs, improving reliability, and automating complex flows. Over time, I've worked on teams focused on everything from supply chain logistics to customer service tooling, all the way to product-level strategy and support.
Outside of work, I never stopped building. I maintain a home server lab where I experiment with self-hosted apps, deployment automation, and cloud-native tooling. I've published open source tools and internal packages, and I'm constantly learning more about platform engineering, DevOps, GitOps, and SRE best practices — because I believe in understanding the whole system, not just one layer of the stack.
At my core, I'm a systems thinker with one foot in tech and one in business. I care about clean code, but I care even more about solving real problems for real people. I've always believed that the best engineers aren't just builders — they're communicators, collaborators, and learners. A mentor once told me that the most valuable skill you can have is an ability and willingness to learn — and that idea's gotten me further than any credential ever could.
I'm energized by teams that take technology seriously and by products that aim to make people's lives better. Whether I'm leading a sprint or prototyping a side project, I try to approach the work with curiosity, empathy, and a bias toward action. I like to build things that don't just work — but work well, and keep working long after the power button's been hit.
In the next few years, I hope to grow into more senior technical leadership roles — while still staying close to the code and architecture. I'm always looking for opportunities to stretch my skills, ship great software, and learn something new.