Nandor Licker
Technical Staff at Perplexity
London, England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolNandor Licker is a technical staff engineer with 13 years of experience building low-level compilers, runtimes and hardware-adjacent tooling from research to production. He holds a PhD and MPhil from Cambridge and a First in Computing from Imperial, and has shipped compiler and simulation work at SiFive and now builds Perplexity AI’s in-house inference runtime to serve models from DeepSeek to RoBERTa. His open-source footprint spans LLVM/Clang, CIRCT and the widely used FireSim project, where he’s fixed subtle UB, serialization and build-system issues—work that reflects deep attention to correctness in performance-critical code. Nandor’s background includes internships across top-tier tech firms and a stint as a clang frontend contractor, giving him rare cross-cutting expertise in compilers, FPGA-accelerated simulation and ML inference stacks. Colleagues describe him as someone who makes “GPUs go brrrrrr” with a research-grade rigor applied to pragmatic engineering trade-offs.
13 years of coding experience
5 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Computer Science at University of CambridgeBachelor of Engineering - BE, Computing, First, Bachelor of Engineering - BE, Computing, First at Imperial College London
Github Skills (18)
simulation10
c-language10
compiler-development10
simulations10
firrtl10
constexpr10
clangd10
cprogramming-language10
clang10
codegen9
bytecode9
mlr8
code-optimization8
canonicalization7
test-automation6
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
llvm/circt
Mar 2022 - Dec 2022
Circuit IR Compilers and Tools
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:2 releases, 219 reviews, 91 commits in 9 months
Contributions summary:Nandor primarily contributed to the development of the Circuit IR Compilers and Tools (CIRCT) project. Their work focused on enhancing the SystemVerilog (SV) dialect within CIRCT, including adding features such as a file descriptor parameter to the `fwrite` operation. They also addressed issues related to type checking and memory management within the FIRRTL dialect. Furthermore, the user made improvements to the overall code quality by fixing bugs, implementing canonicalization passes, and refactoring code.
compilersbazelmlircircuitunikernel
firesim/firesim
Jul 2022 - Jan 2023
FireSim: Fast and Effortless FPGA-accelerated Hardware Simulation with On-Prem and Cloud Flexibility
Role in this project:Software Engineer
Software EngineerContributions:131 reviews, 72 commits, 173 PRs in 6 months
Contributions summary:Nandor primarily focused on fixing issues related to potential undefined behavior (UB) in the TracerV module within the FireSim library, specifically addressing function return values. They also made changes to support serialization of bridge parameters and modified code related to bridge annotations within the midas/widgets directory. Furthermore, the user was involved in enabling and integrating clang-format for the C++ sources and correcting build system configurations.
risc-vscalablecircuitsacceleratedlattice
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