— Building Fast, Smart, and with Purpose
When Eric Tilley talks about software development, you can hear both precision and passion in his voice. A lifelong coder who wrote his first .NET programs in middle school, Eric’s path to Fortified was built on curiosity, deep technical skill, and a desire to move fast without the red tape of big enterprise.
From Early Code to Enterprise Systems
“I’ve liked computers since I was a little kid,” Eric says. “I started learning my first .NET language when I was about 11 or 12—and I’ve never really left.”
After earning both his undergraduate and master’s degrees in Computer Science from the University of Alabama on an academic scholarship, Eric began his career at Sabre, where he spent six years working on hospitality systems that power online hotel bookings. “It was a lot of old-school WCF backend work—the infrastructure that makes booking a hotel room online possible,” he explains.
That experience taught him scale, structure, and the complexities of large, interconnected systems. But it also left him craving something smaller, faster, and more dynamic.
Finding the Right Fit at Fortified
When Eric joined Fortified, the contrast was immediate. “The idea of being able to make an impact quickly was super attractive,” he says. “At big enterprises, something simple might take months or years to deliver. Here, we can do it in a day.”
That agility, he adds, is part of what makes working at Fortified so rewarding. “There’s not a ton of bureaucracy or red tape—you have a voice. You can get things done.”
Eric’s day-to-day work centers around building new features for Fortified WISdom, the company’s FinOps Observability platform, while supporting customers directly. “We deliver new features every two weeks,” he says. “There’s always something new in the pipeline.”
Sharpening His SQL Edge
While Eric’s background is in application development, joining Fortified has deepened his expertise in SQL. “I didn’t realize how much I’d tune my SQL chops here,” he admits. “A lot of what I do is writing complex queries that run behind dashboards. I’ve gotten so much better at SQL—being surrounded by world-class database experts here makes that possible.”
It’s a skill that aligns perfectly with Fortified’s ethos: building solutions for database professionals, by database professionals.
A Developer’s Favorite Feature
When asked about the feature he’s most proud of, Eric doesn’t hesitate: WISdom Advisor, the AI assistant that helps users query their data and understand insights in plain language.
“Building that integration was really cool,” he says. “Being able to click on a chart or table and have the AI explain what’s going on—that’s powerful. And seeing users actually engage with it and get value out of it is really rewarding.”
Eric’s excitement, however, goes beyond the present. “The future use cases are where it gets interesting—daily executive summaries, intelligent recommendations, and more proactive insights. Getting the foundation right is the first step.”
Elegant Solutions to Complex Problems
One of Eric’s favorite technical challenges so far has been the Job Concurrency Heat Map, a feature that visualizes workload behavior across environments. “The algorithm behind it is really unintuitive,” he explains. “You need to calculate concurrency efficiently without being computationally expensive. Finding elegant solutions like that is one of the things I love most about this job.”
Collaboration Without the Ego
Ask Eric what defines Fortified’s development culture, and his answer is immediate: collaboration. “Everything’s super cross-functional. If I need a database change, firewall adjustment, or UI tweak, it’s usually done the same day. Everyone here is brilliant—and there’s no ego. Just smart people working together to solve problems.”
That collaborative spirit is also deeply personal for Eric. He credits both Holt Hopkins and Adi Cohen as major influences. “Holt was actually the chief architect at Sabre when I started my career,” Eric recalls. “It’s kind of wild to work with him again—this time as a peer and friend. I’ve learned so much from him about architecture, infrastructure, and building in the cloud.”
Looking Ahead: The Future of API and AI Integration
When it comes to what excites him next, Eric’s focus is on how WISdom can integrate even more intelligently with large language models through emerging standards like MCP (Model Context Protocol).
“The idea is to expose APIs in a way that an LLM can directly query them,” he says. “A user could ask WISdom a question, and the model would make multiple API calls, retrieve the data it needs, and build a complete answer. That’s the future—and we’re already experimenting with it.”
The Fortified Difference
For Eric, what sets Fortified apart isn’t just the technology—it’s the pace and purpose. “We’re still small enough to move fast, try things, and learn quickly,” he says. “We don’t have the baggage of legacy systems. That freedom lets us innovate at the speed the industry’s changing—and that’s something the big players can’t do.”
About Fortified WISdom
Fortified WISdom helps database, financial, and technical teams align around shared cost and performance insights. With continuous innovation, deep SQL expertise, and a focus on actionable FinOps Observability, Fortified is redefining how organizations understand and optimize the total cost of their data.