Nicholas Gates
Co-Founder & CTO at Spiral
London, England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolNicholas Gates is a London-based technology leader and co-founder with 11 years of hands-on experience building large-scale data platforms and developer tools. As CTO of Spiral and former Engineering Group Lead at Palantir, he has designed and shipped core infrastructure including Spark compute, transaction cloud storage, job orchestration and CI/CD services. His background spans quantitative engineering at Citadel and low-latency platform work at Goldman Sachs, giving him a strong mix of production reliability and data-driven problem solving. He contributes to notable open-source projects—helping improve Palantir’s Python Language Server and Gradle baseline tooling—demonstrating attention to code quality, testing and developer experience. Comfortable moving between systems design and test automation, he pairs strategic leadership with the ability to dive into API, RPC and refactoring details. A Cambridge Computer Science graduate, he brings both academic rigor and pragmatic delivery to fast-moving engineering organizations.
11 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Maths Further Maths Physics Electronics Economics, Maths Further Maths Physics Electronics Economics at Richard Hale SchoolBachelor of Arts (BA) Computer Science, Bachelor of Arts (BA) Computer Science at Emmanuel College, Cambridge
Github Skills (19)
python10
testing10
language-server-protocol10
software-quality10
java10
javas10
gradle-plugin10
refactoring10
gradlew10
error-prone10
gradle10
pytest9
junit9
code-analysis9
linting8
Programming languages (17)
Github contributions (5)
palantir/python-language-server
Jan 2017 - Feb 2020
An implementation of the Language Server Protocol for Python
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Test Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & Test Automation EngineerContributions:53 releases, 185 commits, 318 PRs in 3 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Nicholas's primary contributions involved implementing and testing features for the Python language server. They added a Readme file, which demonstrates the ability to contribute to project documentation and user onboarding. The user wrote tests for the linting, completion, and references providers. These changes indicate a focus on improving code quality and ensuring the functionality of the language server's core features. Further modifications included supporting Python 3 and restructuring the JSON RPC logic.
pythonocto-correct-managedserver-protocollsplanguage-server
palantir/gradle-baseline
Oct 2017 - Sep 2022
A set of Gradle plugins that configure default code quality tools for developers.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:2 releases, 26 commits, 27 PRs in 5 years
Contributions summary:Nicholas contributed to the `gradle-baseline` repository by implementing and refining error-prone checks to enforce code quality standards, specifically focusing on file stream usage and exception logging within catch blocks. They also contributed to the creation of a generic JUnit reports plugin and refactoring of the circle style plugin. Further commits involve refactoring, adding and applying error prone suggested fixes and refaster rules for code improvements.
spotbugsocto-correct-managedgradlepmdgradle-plugins
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