Davis Ford
Senior Vice President of Engineering @North
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WORK HISTORY
Senior Vice President of Engineering @North
North is a leading U.S. fintech and payments company serving merchants nationwide. In 2019 I joined as the sole engineer for North\'s Hospitality Group — recruited to build the engineering organization and a brand new restaurant point-of-sale platform entirely from scratch.Over six years I architected and led development of a cloud-native, multi-tenant POS platform built on Go, web-technologies, Kotlin, Terraform, Kubernetes, and full CI/CD automation. The platform is currently in private pilot and on track for full commercial launch in 2026.I grew the engineering team from just myself to 30 engineers — hiring every one personally — spanning data science, DevOps, full-stack, front-end, back-end, QA, and project management.I led technical due diligence for North\'s acquisition of SALIDO, assumed post-acquisition leadership of that team, and have served as a trusted technology advisor to the C-suite — including leading the division\'s adoption of agentic AI capabilities across the platform.
EDUCATION
Wayne State University
Master of Science - MS, Computer Science
Michigan State University
Bachelor of Science - BS, Zoology/Animal Biology
SKILLS
ABOUT DAVIS FORD
I\'m a technology executive with 25+ years of experience building and scaling engineering organizations across fintech, hospitality software, IoT, and automotive telematics. My career has been defined by one consistent pattern: joining at the ground floor, building something significant, and leaving it better than I found it. Most recently, I\'ve led the engineering organization for North\'s Hospitality Group — a division of North (formerly North American Bancard), one of the largest independent fintech and payments companies in the U.S. I joined in 2019 as the sole engineer for the division and built the team to 30 engineers, spanning data science, DevOps, full-stack, QA, and project management. Along the way, we\'ve architected a new cloud-native, multi-tenant restaurant POS platform from the ground up using Terraform, Kubernetes, and full CI/CD automation — currently in private pilot and on track for full commercial launch in 2026. Before North, I served as CTO of EmaginePOS, a Detroit-based restaurant POS startup I joined as a shareholder and board member. We grew the merchant base from under 100 to 400+ active locations and built a platform that collectively processed nearly $1B per year before being acquired by SpotOn in 2018. I played an active role in the acquisition process and stayed on as a technical consultant for SpotOn for a year post-close to support the transition. I have a strong track record in two areas that tend to matter most at the executive level: building high-performance engineering teams and making the right architectural bets. I believe deeply that you cannot lead engineers who don\'t respect you — and that respect is earned by demonstrating technical excellence, not by title. The engineers I\'ve worked with have followed me across companies, and that\'s the metric I\'m most proud of. I\'m passionate about AI strategy, cloud-native platform development, fintech and hospitality technology, and building engineering cultures where great people can do the best work of their careers with minimal bureaucracy.
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