Nikolaus Rath
Software Engineer at Quadrature
United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolNikolaus Rath is a seasoned software engineer with 16 years of experience building and hardening back-end systems, currently based in the UK and working at Quadrature. His career spans SRE and Linux engineering roles at Google and Jane Street, long-term consultancy for performance-sensitive teams like Valve, and research-driven control systems development in fusion physics. An active open-source contributor, he has improved critical filesystem and storage projects—contributing SFTP extensions and race-condition fixes to sshfs and libfuse, and cross-platform correctness and performance fixes to Cython and S3QL. Trained as a PhD plasma physicist, he brings a rare combination of rigorous scientific problem-solving and practical systems engineering, often tackling low-level concurrency and portability issues that are easy to overlook. Colleagues value him for quietly durable solutions: refactors, compiler-warning fixes, and subtle protocol improvements that reduce operational risk.
16 years of coding experience
18 years of employment as a software developer
Bankkaufmann (IHK) Finance, Bankkaufmann (IHK) Finance at Robert-Schumann Berufskolleg, Essen, GermanyAbitur, Abitur at Rudolf-Steiner Schule WittenBachelor of Science Physics, Bachelor of Science Physics at Jacobs University BremenMaster of Science (M.Sc.) Applied Physics, Master of Science (M.Sc.) Applied Physics at Columbia EngineeringDoctor of Philosophy (PhD) Plasma Physics, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Plasma Physics at Columbia University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
English, German
Github Skills (24)
filesystem10
performance-monitor10
back-end-development10
python10
fuse10
testing10
c1110
c1710
performance-analysis10
cython10
cprogramming-language10
userspace10
sftp10
documentation10
c-language9
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
libfuse/libfuse
Mar 2018 - Jan 2023
The reference implementation of the Linux FUSE (Filesystem in Userspace) interface
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:53 releases, 101 reviews, 94 commits in 4 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Nikolaus primarily contributed to the documentation of the FUSE library, updating and clarifying the information regarding the usage of various operations like `forget`, `readdirplus`, and `open`. Their work included describing the expected behavior, explaining the impact of changes, and offering suggestions for best practices. They also added new example files and test cases to the library, showcasing and testing features like setxattr and writeback caching.
userspacefuselinuxfuse-filesystemfilesystem
s3ql/s3ql
Apr 2010 - Jun 2022
a full featured file system for online data storage
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:32 releases, 54 reviews, 2284 commits in 12 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Nikolaus's commits indicate a focus on back-end development tasks within the S3QL project. The primary focus is on refactoring and enhancing core functionality of the storage backend through modifications to the core file system code. The user also added support for server-side encryption of objects as well as code for supporting reduced redundancy storage classes. They also seem to be involved in testing and maintaining the system.
persistent-storagefull-featureddata-storagenodejsdatabase
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