Nikolai Flowers
Senior Software Engineer at Waymo
Mountain View, California, United States
Summary
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Senior🎓
Top SchoolNikolai Flowers is a Senior Software Engineer with a decade of experience building motion control, planning, state estimation and SLAM solutions for wheeled, flying and legged robots. Based in Mountain View, he has progressed through engineering roles at Waymo and contributed research-grade software at Carnegie Mellon’s Robomechanics Lab, where he developed contact-informed state estimators and on-board control systems. His open-source contributions include core estimator and controller scaffolding, simulation integration, and custom messaging for a quadruped SDK used by the Robomechanics Lab. Nikolai combines academic rigor—a CMU MS and BS in Mechanical Engineering with a robotics focus—with hands-on production experience deploying high-performance systems on diverse robotic platforms. He’s known for turning simulation-driven design insights (e.g., sim-in-the-loop optimization for hopping robots) into robust, real-time implementations. Energetic and collaborative, he brings a bias for practical experimentation and rapid iteration in complex perception and control stacks.
10 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science - MS Mechanical Engineering, Master of Science - MS Mechanical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (14)
robotics10
c-language10
gazebosim10
cprogramming-language10
ros10
gazebo-simulator10
operating-system10
state-space9
estimate9
state-machine9
parameter-estimation9
eigen9
control-systems9
kinematics8
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
robomechanics/quad-sdk
Aug 2020 - Apr 2021
Software tools for agile quadrupeds, developed by the Robomechanics Lab at Carnegie Mellon University.
Role in this project:
Back-end & Robotics Engineer
Back-end & Robotics EngineerContributions:66 reviews, 102 commits, 52 PRs in 7 months
Contributions summary:Nikolai primarily worked on implementing core components for a quadrupedal robot SDK. Their initial contributions focused on creating skeleton code for an estimator and a controller, including header and source files. They added support for rosdep, integrated custom messages, and refactored package names. Furthermore, the user added an interpolator, custom messages, and implemented a gazebo simulation setup to integrate with the existing code.
ignitionroboticspythoncarnegie-mellon-universityagile
nikolaif399/LinearMPC
Oct 2020 - Dec 2020
Linear model predictive control library in MATLAB
Contributions:54 commits, 10 PRs, 47 pushes in 1 month
matlablinear-modelcontrol-librarymodel-predictive-controlmachine-learning
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