Nik Waldron
Senior Software Engineer at Annapurna Labs
Seattle, Washington, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolNik Waldron is a Senior Software Engineer based in Seattle with a decade of hands-on experience building machine learning infrastructure and accelerators at AWS, focusing on delivering a first-class PyTorch experience for the AWS Neuron platform. With a 15+ year background in C++ and extensive exposure to embedded systems, speech recognition, and payment systems, he blends deep technical expertise with practical product and compliance experience. He has shifted between individual contributor and leadership roles, running teams up to 16 engineers while continuing to mentor junior engineers and engage directly with customers. Notably, his work on benchmarking and adapting BERT for AWS Inferentia helped make Neuron-powered inference accessible and performant for real workloads. Comfortable across Windows, Linux and diverse embedded platforms, he gravitates toward projects that apply advanced theory to improve customer outcomes. Outside work he pursues interests spanning neurophysiology, economics and finance, reflecting a wide curiosity that informs his engineering perspective.
10 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
BE, Electrical and Electronic Engineering - Signal Processing, BE, Electrical and Electronic Engineering - Signal Processing at The University of AucklandUniversity A Bursary, High School/Secondary Diplomas and Certificates, University A Bursary, High School/Secondary Diplomas and Certificates at Avondale College
Github Skills (11)
transformers10
huggingface-transformers10
transformer10
machine-learning10
pytorch10
python10
bert10
jupyter-notebook9
benchmark9
benchmarking9
nlp9
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
aws-neuron/aws-neuron-sdk
Feb 2020 - Dec 2020
Powering AWS purpose-built machine learning chips. Blazing fast and cost effective, natively integrated into PyTorch and TensorFlow and integrated with your favorite AWS services
Role in this project:
ML Engineer
ML EngineerContributions:39 commits, 6 PRs, 8 pushes in 10 months
Contributions summary:Nik primarily contributed to benchmarking and adapting a PyTorch BERT model for Inferentia hardware within the AWS Neuron SDK. Their work involved setting up and testing the model on the MRPC dataset, including code for dataset creation, results reporting, and parallel inference execution. The user also made modifications to the existing BERT tutorial notebooks and scripts, and corrected formatting and paths to improve usability.
pythoncost-effectivetensorflowawsintegrated
mrnikwaws/pytorch
Aug 2023 - Dec 2024
Tensors and Dynamic neural networks in Python with strong GPU acceleration
Contributions:8 pushes, 1 branch in 1 year 4 months
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