Nick Santos
Senior Principal Engineer at Docker, Inc
New York, New York, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolNick Santos is a principal software engineer with 16 years of hands-on experience building developer tools and cloud-native infrastructure, currently based in New York. He has led teams and products at Google, Medium, and Tilt, and most recently served as a senior principal engineer at Docker, focusing on developer experience for cloud and container workflows. Nick spans the full stack—from build systems and databases to UIs and deployment automation—and has deep open-source contributions to high-profile projects like BuildKit, Docker Compose, and the Closure Compiler. He combines systems-level rigor (type inference, build tooling, gRPC, tracing) with practical DX improvements (live update scaffolding, file-watching on Windows, Tilt extensions) to make complex workflows feel simple. A Dartmouth CS and Math graduate, he has a founder’s mindset from leading Tilt and a track record of shipping cross-platform, production-grade infrastructure.
16 years of coding experience
17 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Arts (B.A.), Computer Science, Math, Bachelor of Arts (B.A.), Computer Science, Math at Dartmouth CollegeOyster River High School
Stackoverflow
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Github Skills (38)
closure10
kubernetes10
javascript10
docker10
container10
buildkite10
fsnotify10
kubernetes-apiserver10
windows10
google-closure-compiler10
bash10
dockers10
cicd10
file-watcher10
type-system10
Programming languages (22)
Github contributions (5)
tilt-dev/tilt-extensions
May 2020 - Dec 2022
Extensions for Tilt
Role in this project:
DevOps Engineer & Automation Engineer
DevOps Engineer & Automation EngineerContributions:271 reviews, 105 commits, 398 PRs in 2 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Nick primarily contributed to the automation and extension of the Tilt development environment. Their work included adding new extensions for various functionalities, such as manipulating namespaces, deploying configmaps, and integrating with tools like Ko and Ngrok. They also implemented testing frameworks for these extensions and improved the existing CI/CD pipeline, demonstrating a strong focus on enhancing the developer experience and automating deployment processes within the Tilt environment. Moreover, the user tackled issues like build process improvements, and multi-architecture image support.
tiltdeveloper-toolsextensionskubernetesdevelopment-environment
tilt-dev/tilt
Aug 2018 - Jan 2023
Define your dev environment as code. For microservice apps on Kubernetes.
Role in this project:Backend & DevOps Engineer
Backend & DevOps EngineerContributions:53 releases, 1194 reviews, 2143 commits in 4 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Nick's contributions focused on implementing core features and building the infrastructure for the development environment as code for a microservice application on Kubernetes. The user added support for live update scaffolding, by writing code differences. They also added new features and added functionalities. The code changes and commit messages suggest involvement in both backend development, testing, and deployment automation.
golangdevskaffolddev-environmenttilt
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