Nikola Knežević
Performance Engineer at IMC Trading
Küsnacht (ZH), Zurich, Switzerland
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolNikola Knežević is a performance-focused full-stack engineer with 15 years of experience optimizing trading infrastructure, distributed systems, and developer productivity pipelines. Currently a Performance Engineer at IMC Trading, he combines deep observability and reverse-engineering of exchange microstructure with practical performance analysis and statistical tooling. He has a strong functional-programming bent (Rust, Nix) alongside Python, Go and Scala, and has driven reproducible, immutable DevOps and CI/CD at scale. At DFINITY and in prominent open-source projects like Nix and Hydra he bootstrapped internal developer productivity teams, automated toil, and contributed core back-end and automation improvements. His background spans academic research (PhD from EPFL) to high-frequency trading and cloud storage, giving him a rare blend of rigorous systems thinking and pragmatic delivery. Notably, he has contributed to the core of the widely used Nix package manager and built monitoring and testing platforms still in production use.
15 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
Diploma Engineer (MsC equivalent), Computer Engineering and Information Science, Diploma Engineer (MsC equivalent), Computer Engineering and Information Science at School of Electrical Engineering (ETF), University of BelgradeDoctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Computer Science at Ecole polytechnique fédérale de LausanneMathematics, Informatics, and Physics, Mathematics, Informatics, and Physics at Mathematical Gymnasium
Serbian, French, Bulgarian, German, English
Stackoverflow
799reputation
30kreached
8answers
26questions
Github Skills (32)
json-parser10
json10
c-language10
nix10
jsonp10
cicd10
automation10
parsing10
data-transfer10
automations10
package-manager10
cprogramming-language10
python9
perl9
declarative9
Programming languages (21)
Github contributions (5)
NixOS/hydra
Jul 2019 - Jun 2020
Hydra, the Nix-based continuous build system
Role in this project:
DevOps Engineer & Automation Engineer
DevOps Engineer & Automation EngineerContributions:20 commits, 17 PRs, 17 comments in 10 months
Contributions summary:Nikola primarily focused on improving the Hydra build system by implementing and enhancing automation and infrastructure components. Their contributions include adding a plugin for InfluxDB notifications, incorporating debug logging for improved monitoring, and converting tests to the Python DSL. The user also addressed dependencies by adding `Term::Size::Any` and handling missing values in declarative jobsets, streamlining the build process. Additionally, they refactored code, and removed legacy components, enhancing overall system stability and efficiency.
nixoscontinuoushydrabuild-system
NixOS/nix
Jan 2020 - May 2020
Nix, the purely functional package manager
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1 review, 19 commits, 5 PRs in 4 months
Contributions summary:Nikola primarily contributed to the Nix package manager's core functionality. Their work included adding support for Unicode escapes in JSON parsing within the `libexpr` library. They also refactored code related to data transfer, renaming and modifying data transfer classes and settings. Furthermore, the user made changes to the file transfer mechanism and updated tests to ensure ref name validity.
functional-programmingnixosdeclarative-languagec-plus-pluspackage-manager
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.