Niko Lazaris
Staff Software Engineer at Drift
New York, New York, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolNiko Lazaris is a Staff Software Engineer in New York with 12 years of full‑stack experience building scalable web products and sales tooling, currently leading engineering work at Drift. He combines hands‑on JavaScript/React front‑end work with Java and cloud backend systems, and has a track record of shipping features for high‑traffic products and scaling them for customers. Niko’s background spans startups and operator roles—from co‑founding two companies and building a spaced‑repetition education product to shaping B2B event platforms and developer-facing hackathon starters at Major League Hacking. He’s an active open‑source contributor (notably to MLH’s Node and Flask hackathon starters) and brings product instincts from prior PM roles into technical design and team processes. Comfortable toggling between code, architecture, and customer discovery, he favors pragmatic refactors and measurable improvements to developer and user experience.
12 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Business Administration, Finance, Bachelor of Business Administration, Finance at The University of Texas at Austin
Github Skills (23)
javascript10
expressjs10
handlebars10
python10
flask-ask10
sqlalchemy10
github-api10
front-end-development10
nodejs10
flask10
api-design9
restful-api9
postgresql9
back-end-development9
api-rest9
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
MLH/mlh-hackathon-flask-starter
Jan 2019 - Apr 2019
Hackathon starter project for Flask applications
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:21 commits, 9 PRs, 25 pushes in 3 months
Contributions summary:Niko significantly contributed to the project by implementing user models and integrating GitHub OAuth for user authentication. They refactored the project by renaming files, adding a GitHub service, and abstracting code for better readability. The user also added features like unstarring a repository and updated the project for code review. Further contributions included integrating markdown support for documentation and modifying the project structure.
flaskhackathon-starterpythonflask-api
MLH/mlh-hackathon-nodejs-starter
Feb 2019 - Apr 2019
Hackathon starter project for Node.js applications
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:23 commits, 5 PRs, 18 pushes in 1 month
Contributions summary:Niko primarily contributed to the front-end and back-end aspects of the Node.js-based hackathon starter project. Their contributions included adding Handlebars for templating, configuring routes, and implementing a tutorial section. They also addressed asset paths and updated the UI by adding tutorial and login features, integrating GitHub authentication, and creating a basic structure for the home and tutorial pages.
hackathon-starternode-jsjavascriptexpressnodejs
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.