About NXT1

Game-changing technology, inspired by the future and powered by an expert team.

High-Velocity, Secure SaaS Deployment & Automated Operations

NXT1 was founded with a vision to make SaaS security better for everyone, allowing developers to focus on building innovation and subscribers to benefit from it faster. We aspire to accelerate the impact of SaaS, reduce founder & investor risk, make OPEX irrelevant and increase the cyber economic cost to the adversary (cyber criminals).

Our Mission

NXT1’s mission is to free all software developers and vendors from the traditional overhead of infrastructure management, cybersecurity and security operations, compliance, and marketplace subscriptions, allowing them to focus 100% of their resources, energy and creativity on building innovative software and the success of their customers.

NXT1 meets software vendors where they are, regardless of their business or software maturity, and enables them to deploy compliant, innovative SaaS technology to their subscribers in weeks, not years.

The NXT1 LaunchIT platform offers a streamlined development and SecDevOps experience that virtually eliminates production environment ramp-up, allowing software creators of all types to focus on product quality and innovation.

Leadership

John Sobczak is a proven thought leader and strategist with more than 25 years’ experience developing and delivering more than $6B in technology solutions to the Public Sector. He is driven by the potential impact of technology innovations on real-world problems today and into the future. He co-founded NXT1 to offer such innovations to independent software vendors and SaaS subscribers alike by envisioning the democratization of SaaS security.

As CEO, John encorages the NXT1 team to push past traditional boundaries and explore that which is often just out of reach. His aptitude for communicating complex concepts and solutions to any audience level – from developers and engineers to C-Suite Executives – promotes collective understanding and faster progress toward common goals.

John’s technical acumen grew from a bachelor’s degree in computer science and his early experience at Unisys and Booz Allen Hamilton, where he architected, implemented, and managed sophisticated IT projects and programs across multiple disciplines and domains supporting DoD and DHS. As Govplace’s Vice President of Sales, John’s leadership and focus on solutions led to 150% CAGR over 10 years with strategic awards on multi-year contracts such as DHS CDM. Herein this role he gained valuable experience working with impressive trailblazing technology companies as they struggled to find traction, lacking many key business assets, including strategy, messaging, relationships, and in particular, a path to achieving regulatory compliance.

Seeing a clear opportunity, John founded RockITek in 2017, a progressive technology distributor and aggregator. He bootstrapped this startup to $12M+ in the first 2 years. With RockITek, John set out with a clear strategic vision and approach that would prove to accelerate the impact of their partners’ technologies. The opportunity to work closely with dozens of early-stage companies and their executives helped him more deeply understand their world and provided a roadmap of friction that needed to be eliminated to facilitate their success. This experience provided impetus for the founding of NXT1.

Darren House is a seasoned technology executive with over 20 years' experience in providing strategic leadership and innovative solutions in the government markets. He currently serves as the Chief Technology Officer at NXT 1, empowering Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) to securely launch and manage game changing SaaS faster and more cost-effectively.

Previously, Darren established RockIT Labs and served as CTO of RockITek. He led the development of TheKeyosk, a cutting-edge security key managed service, and ultimately, NXT1 LaunchIT. Under his leadership, RockITek expanded its capabilities from a solutions-based aggregator to a cloud security provider, providing automated detection and protection features for cloud environments that integrate with existing cloud products and data.

Prior to co-founding NXT1 (as CTO of RockITek), he served as a Senior Security Specialist for Amazon Web Services. At AWS, he partnered with the Head of Business Development for AWS Worldwide Public Sector for Security Services to develop business aligned technical global public sector strategies and GTM plans; execute solution and strategy alignment; create and lead development of AWS security solutions, evangelize, blog, and create webinars to communicate AWS security positioning and technical capabilities to the global public sector market.

With extensive experience in technical roles, Darren has successfully led large projects and major program captures, developed proof-of-concept solutions for on-premise, cloud, and hybrid environments, and authored white papers, articles, and blogs on emerging technology topics. He has also delivered sales and technical presentations on Virtualization, Data Center, Cloud, Security, and their relationship to Government trends. Darren has held various leadership roles including CTO, Director of Solutions Management, Technologist, Architect, and network and systems engineering, showcasing his diverse expertise in the technology industry.

Darren is recognized as an industry thought leader and is known for his strategic vision and expertise in leveraging innovative technologies to solve complex technology security challenges.

Bruce Popky leads strategic and operational marketing for NXT1. He is an accomplished business leader with over 20 years' experience connecting technology solutions with markets and customers. Most recently, he served as Director of Marketing for asset management SaaS pioneer, EZO. Previous roles include heading marketing for IoT startup Precision Fermentation and enterprise IT performance monitoring software company, eG Innovations.

Bruce has provided marketing leadership and tactical direction for technology-driven businesses across a wide variety of industries, including IT, financial services, healthcare, biotech, commercial printing, and wholesale distribution. He earned his B.A. in Philosophy from Dickinson College. Bruce is based in Austin, Texas.

Our Story

NXT1 is a direct result of our founders’ experiences as leaders of RockITek, a Maryland-based enterprise technology consulting and solutions provider. The RockITek team worked closely with emerging software vendors challenged with delivering enterprise SaaS that would meet customer’s security and compliance requirements with their existing budget and resources.

When the opportunity to build a SaaS presented itself in early 2022 that required compliance with FedRAMP requirements, John and Darren discussed a highly secure and automated architecture that could be reusable in the future.

Darren engineered a solution with Zero Trust security, multi-tenancy, scale, and automated operations at its core using a 100% cloud-native, serverless architecture. With this architecture, RockITek’s product TheKeyosk was built and launched in just 2 months.

Together, John and Darren founded NXT1 to launch the LaunchIT platform, inspired by the success of this initial exploratory work and the potential to accelerate the impact of secure SaaS.

Our Culture

We are driven true believers, excited by the possibilities presented with each new technology.
We are a group of curious and talented individuals working hard to make a difference, not only in our careers and in the company, but in the world.
We each bring our unique talents and ideas to make a direct impact.
We desire to democratize security technologies by removing barriers.
We are passionate about launching the next wave of game changing software to the world.

News

Careers

Join our Team and Help Build the Future

NXT1 is always interested in hearing from talented, driven professionals, across all areas. Please reach out and let us know how you excel and why NXT1 inspires you.

Currrent Openings

DevOps Engineer

The NXT1 Cloud Company (dba NXT1) is an early stage startup based outside Baltimore Maryland. That means you will have a significant impact on our flagship solution, LaunchIT, a platform purpose-built for software vendors (B2B) to rapidly build and securely launch cloud-native serverless SaaS. By joining us in this early stage, you’ll also have the opportunity to participate in equity ownership when our valuation still has a lot of room to grow!

LaunchIT provides day 1 protection, scale, and maturity for any SaaS. You have the opportunity to build and grow your experience and LaunchIT’s features and capabilities by expanding on what we’ve started. We want this role to be a unique opportunity for a person who wants to experiment with us, directly impacting the product and the future of the business.

Will you be the NXT1 to make a difference?

We’re looking for an AWS DevOps Engineer to join our team either Full Time or Part Time (to start) as we launch SaaS significantly faster and cheaper than traditional approaches. Reporting directly to our co-founder & CTO, Darren House, you will design, build, test, and validate cloud products, tools, and integrations. This includes creating and maintaining a cloud DevSecOps system and processes; creating hybrid cloud and on-premises automation workflows using AWS native services; working collaboratively with our partners to bring cloud products to market; and assisting in developing the technical and API guides for cloud products.

Your top priority on Day 1 will be to focus on enhancing our game changing platform LaunchIT, where you will:

Be NXT1’s DevSecOps expert with AWS cloud native services
Lead the development of cloud products for NXT1
Create and maintain a DevSecOps process for NXT1

This role is an integral part of the entire LaunchIT team where, as our amazing Cloud Developer Engineer, where you will:

Be a subject matter expert in AWS cloud native software development best practices,
Have proven experience working with:
- GitHub, Actions, Secrets, OAuth, GitHub Apps, Deploy Keys
- Serverless Framework, Laravel, PHP, NodeJS, Python
- AWS Serverless services
- CloudFormation, Lambda, Step Functions, Code Pipeline and Code Build
Have experience developing with technologies like:
- Identity technologies, such as AWS IAM, SSO, Cognito, MFA, OIDC and SAML
- Data discovery technologies such as AWS Glue, Macie
- Data protection technologies, such as KMS, Cloud HSM, KMIP and PKCS
- Containers using Fargate containers and Fargate services
- AWS native ML services, such as Comprehend, Textract, SageMaker
Be a US Citizen.
Identify, design/develop, and manage new platform development initiatives.
Envision, develop, and implement effective cost, performance, availability, and security improvements in the existing platform codebase.
Assist with product documentation as new features are built or existing features modified.
Leverage AWS native tools to build DevSecOps observability tooling, dashboards and automations.
With guidance of the Marketing Director, envision, enhance, and create developer related marketing content (blogs, webinars, etc) about the AWS technologies and the LaunchIT platform.

It would be great if you’ve got…

Experience with AWS Systems Manager, CloudWatch, X-Ray, Services
Have knowledge of MITRE ATT&CK framework and OWASP Top 10.
AWS Certified DevOps Engineer Professional certification.
Experience developing with Microsoft Azure
Writing experience; technical documents, blogs, social media

The responsibilities and duties of this position described here are representative of those an employee must perform. This is not a comprehensive list and other duties may be assigned.

It is NXT1’s practice not to discriminate against any employee or applicant because of sex, race, color, age, national origin, religion, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation or sexual preference, pregnancy or maternity, genetic information, marital status, disability, veteran status, or any other basis protected by applicable federal, state or local law. This practice applies to all terms and conditions of employment including, but not limited to, hiring, training, compensation, benefits, promotions, transfers, layoff, Company-sponsored education, social and recreational programs, and treatment on the job. If you have a disability or handicap and would like us to accommodate you in any reasonable way, please inform the NXT1 recruiter so that we can discuss appropriate alternatives available.

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XSOC chose NXT1 LaunchIT because we need to offer SaaS that is both globally available and strictly compliant with all of our customers’ regulatory frameworks. We’re very excited to be able to manage customer subscriptions and scale our services without requiring teams of additional resources. LaunchIT is a key component in our strategy for revenue growth.

Richard BlechFounder & CEO, XSOC CORP

At Parallel, we specialize in developing secure software for regulated industries where trust and compliance are paramount. LaunchIT has been a game-changer for us, offering a managed and opinionated IaaS platform that lets us focus on what we do best – writing exceptional software. Their platform enables us to easily manage and monitor all of our clients' applications and infrastructure at a glance, enhances observability, and ensures that our projects are always built on a solid foundation of security. Choosing LaunchIT means we can confidently tackle high-risk projects, knowing the infrastructure side is expertly handled.

Emaad AliCEO, Parallel