CTO · Specialty Insurance Product Officer · InsurTech SaaS Founding digital leader · Retail & Ecommerce

I build the organizational and technology foundations that let businesses lead their industries — from the very first line of code to the C-suite.

My post-degree career started with roles that led me to be the initial digital hire focused purely on a reboot of their digital strategy with Kroger. The work centered on unifying loyalty, traditional media, and ecommerce into a seamless go-to-market. I led significant technology investment, strategic acquisitions, and the consolidation of legacy go-to-market strategies — and that channel grew from zero to $5B+ in about five years. At UKG, I scaled a $3B+ HCM platform through a landmark merger and an $11B take-private. I served as Product Officer of the world's leading P&C InsurTech through a $2.6B acquisition. I now serve as CTO at Core Specialty Insurance. Each stop a bigger stage, a broader mandate, and a broader opportunity.

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Nick Lien
Currently

Building the unified technology platform that powers Core Specialty's line-by-line specialty strategy — enabling each business line to compete while consolidating the back office into one efficient engine, applying AI and ML thoughtfully to scale the workforce through intelligence, and positioning the company to become the differentiated data company of specialty P&C.

$5B+
Digital channel built from zero at Kroger
$2.6B
Acquisition of Duck Creek as Product Officer
$3B+
HCM revenue platform scaled at UKG
5+ yrs
Vice Chair, NewPath Child & Family Solutions
15+
High-value M&A integrations led across retail, HCM, and insurance
About

My career started in operations — store management, government, hospitality, and sales — long before technology entered the picture. That breadth turned out to be the right preparation. I learned how organizations actually work from the inside: how teams are built, how customers make decisions, and how fast the gap between a good strategy and real execution can open. I think about people and technology the way an operator does, not a theorist. Neither is an end in itself — but together, they are the engine behind every meaningful competitive advantage of the last fifty years.

Somewhere along the way I became the person organizations turn to when they need to build something that doesn't yet exist, or when something critical simply has to work. I've had the opportunity to do that across six industries — retail, government, hospitality, HCM SaaS, insurance software, and specialty P&C — and at nearly every functional level within each. The context has always changed. The underlying question has not: how do you align the right people and the right technology to create something durable?

I think the best technology leaders are translators — between engineering and the business, between what's technically possible and what's actually needed, between today's architecture and tomorrow's opportunity. I try to be that for the teams I work with. It means spending as much time understanding the business as I do the technology stack.

I care a lot about the people I work with. The best outcomes I've been part of came from teams that trusted each other, communicated clearly, and stayed focused on the work. That's the environment I try to create.

Outside of work, I'm based in Cincinnati with my family. I've served on the board of NewPath Child & Family Solutions for 10+ years, including 5+ years as Vice Chairman — a commitment that keeps me connected to what really matters and reminds me that the same principles that make a technology organization work translate to any leadership table.

Selected work
CTO · Current
2026 – present

Core Specialty Insurance Holdings

Leading technology strategy for a fast-growing, AM Best A (Excellent) rated specialty P&C insurer built around a deliberately diffused go-to-market — competing line-by-line across aviation, medical stop-loss, surety, professional lines, and beyond. The technology mandate is two-sided: enable each specialty line with everything it needs to win, while unifying the back office into a single, efficient operating engine. Built on a modern, strategic platform architecture, the work extends to the thoughtful application of AI and ML to scale the workforce through intelligence — accelerating data pipelines, compressing the time from insight to decision, and building the capability that positions Core Specialty as the differentiated data company of specialty insurance.

AM Best A (Excellent) Unified specialty platform Thoughtful AI · ML · data Line-by-line GTM Back-office unification
Product Officer
2022 – 2026

Duck Creek Technologies

Led Duck Creek's transformation from a professional services-led business to a product-led, SaaS revenue-driven company. In doing so, elevated it to the top ranking across every major P&C insurance analyst benchmark: Celent, Forrester, and Gartner among them. The company was taken private by Vista Equity Partners at $2.6B.

The product scope spanned Policy, Billing, Claims, Compliance, Globalization, and a portfolio of strategic acquisitions including reinsurance capabilities and a payments platform. Beneath that, designed and built a modern data platform anchored by a common backplane — tightly integrated systems, loosely coupled for flexibility — which became the foundation for Duck Creek's full agentic AI platform.

That platform is a layered AI topology: experience agents, an orchestration layer, agentic intelligence, an AI gateway, a contributory model context repository, an AI assurance layer, and an integration and API hub — all wrapped in a customer and partner marketplace. Built on neurosymbolic reasoning to ensure deterministic, auditable behavior across highly regulated global markets, with swappable and interchangeable models and an exhaust layer designed to continuously learn and retrain.

$2.6B acquisition Top-ranked · Celent · Forrester · Gartner Product-led transformation Agentic AI platform Neurosymbolic reasoning Common platform backplane
Director → Sr. Director
2019 – 2022

UKG (Ultimate Kronos Group)

Led the stabilization and strategic transformation of high-burn technology initiatives in the platform domain, converting significant capital leakage into a scalable foundation for the company's AI-powered future. Through targeted acquisitions and organic development, architected and delivered an open SaaS platform built on a loosely coupled yet tightly integrated architecture — featuring enterprise-grade IAM, robust data stores, common messaging infrastructure, and a universal data layer serving as the single source of truth across the organization.

By treating core data capabilities as reusable appliances, enabled rapid development of advanced ML and MLOps pipelines, culminating in production-grade AI and Agentic AI systems. The result: dramatically improved operational efficiency, accelerated innovation velocity, and a platform built to turn shared data assets into durable competitive advantage.

These same architectural principles unified not just the acquired technology portfolio, but the merged entity itself — as Ultimate Software and Kronos came together to form UKG, this platform became the common asset pool that made integration possible at scale across a $3B+ HCM SaaS serving 80,000+ organizations in 165 countries.

$3.3B revenue platform 80K+ orgs · 165 countries Open SaaS platform ML · MLOps · Agentic AI Ultimate + Kronos merger Universal data layer
Founding digital hire 13+ year tenure
2005 – 2019

Kroger

Built a career foundation within Kroger's operations — gaining deep insight into the company's culture, execution rhythms, and core capabilities before becoming the initial digital hire tasked with rebooting their digital strategy. That operational grounding shaped everything: the ecommerce strategy was designed to compete directly against pure-play digital disruptors by leveraging what they could never replicate.

Kroger's physical assets positioned close to customers, rich proprietary loyalty data, and established customer relationships became the strategic foundation. Built on top of that: personalized experiences and incentives that meaningfully influenced customer behavior, and the technology architecture to make it seamless — integrating legacy systems with high-performance, scalable, secure ecommerce platforms engineered to global standards and executed domestically.

The result was a hybrid model that fused traditional go-to-market strengths with modern digital capability, allowing the organization to maximize existing assets, achieve sensible scale, and compete from a position only Kroger could occupy. The digital channel grew from zero to $5B+ in about five years, with loyalty data captured on 96% of all transactions, $1B+ in produce merchandising outcomes, and triple-digit ecommerce growth sustained throughout.

$5B+ digital at exit 96% loyalty capture $1B+ produce outcomes Triple-digit ecommerce growth Store manager → digital founder
What colleagues say
"There are people you meet in the course of your career who simply make everything better by being in the room. Nick is one of those people. His warmth, integrity, and genuine willingness to help stand out in all the right ways — he never had an agenda beyond doing great work and lifting the people around him. In an industry full of sharp elbows, Nick is a breath of fresh air. Beyond the character, the man is simply exceptional at what he does. Brilliant, capable, and always operating at the top of his game."
Colleague at Duck Creek Technologies · LinkedIn recommendation
Perspectives
Board & community
Vice Chairman — NewPath Child & Family Solutions
Long-tenured board member, serving as Vice Chairman for 5+ years — shaping strategic initiatives, sustainable growth, and service delivery for children and families across the Cincinnati region.