Jeff Sikes

Director of Application Development

Professional Summary

Technology leader with 13+ years building and scaling engineering teams in mission-driven nonprofit organizations. Proven track record managing cross-functional technical operations, platform modernizations, and vendor relationships while balancing limited resources with organizational impact.

Professional Experience

Director of Application Development
American Association of Nurse Practitioners
Austin, TX | 2023–2025
Led cross-functional team of 6 staff (3 developers, 2 project managers, 1 data analyst) supporting 460,000 nurse practitioners through member services, education, conferences, and political advocacy.
  • Served as acting VP of IT for one year, overseeing application development and infrastructure teams (9 total staff)
  • Implemented Zendesk across departments, reducing support call volume through knowledge base; system ownership successfully transitioned to non-IT staff
  • Modernized infrastructure from physical servers to cloud (Rackspace → Aptify Cloud), implementing load balancing, Cloudflare proxies, and disaster recovery
  • Built Aptify.Core.API abstraction layer providing REST access to AMS and conference systems
  • Managed vendor relationships with Higher Logic, Real Magnet, InReach, Community Brands, and conference providers
Application Development Manager
American Association of Nurse Practitioners
Austin, TX | 2012–2023
Led technical transition from legacy systems to Aptify AMS during rapid organizational growth (35,000 to 120,000 members).
  • Built first in-house development team from scratch; hired and mentored developers and project managers
  • Managed Aptify configuration, custom objects, finance/GL integrations, and third-party connections
  • Developed custom applications for member portal, payments, and conference registration using .NET MVC, React, and SQL Server
  • Established development standards, code review practices, source control workflows, and release processes
  • Collaborated with VP of Technology on annual budget planning and technical roadmap
Web Developer / Information Architect
ECOM PPO Advisors
Dallas, TX | 2005–2012
Maintained and modernized enterprise web applications for healthcare PPO network. Converted legacy platforms (Classic ASP, Perl) to .NET. Mentored developers and designed database structures.