Ben Pickett
Chief Operating Officer - Swa Technology

Ben Pickett joins Swa as our Chief Operating Officer where he drives operational excellence and go-to-market readiness for our AI orchestration platform; aligning engineering, revenue, sales & marketing, and customer operations to move from private beta to scaled adoption.

Ben brings over 25 years of experience as a senior technology executive, building and scaling engineering organizations, platform architecture, and digital transformation programs for major consumer brands. He has held multiple senior roles at Nike, culminating as Global Director of Site Reliability Engineering, managing teams across database, network, cloud, marketing technology, wholesale, and retail sectors while maintaining 99.99% uptime for Nike.com. Ben specializes in modernizing complex ecosystems and delivering enterprise-grade platforms across e-commerce, supply-chain, finance, retail, and data environments, with a pragmatic focus on measurable business outcomes. Ben's work blends enterprise architecture, systems integration, and AI-driven innovation to reduce cost, improve reliability, and accelerate time-to-value.

Throughout Ben's career, he has led global teams to execute multimillion-dollar platform investments, and digital transformations that realized hundreds of millions in cumulative cost savings and materially improved uptime, consumer experience, and transactional reliability for global digital commerce, supply chain, and retail operations. In addition, Ben brings a hands-on approach to trade-off analysis (open vs. proprietary models, vendor concentration risk, and scalability), pairing technical judgments with commercial rigor to preserve margins and protect operational resilience.

Ben shares, "My priorities are clear: make complexity invisible for customers, ensure secure and cost-efficient model orchestration, and build repeatable processes and teams that sustain rapid innovation while safeguarding long-term reliability."

Outside of work, Ben pursues an eclectic range of passions from representing his town as Mayor, deep diving into all things tech, to falconry, in which he raises and trains falcons with his son and serves as a director for the Oregon Falconers Association.
