Niles Salter
Software Engineer II at Pinterest
Herriman, Utah, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolNiles Salter is a Software Engineer II with a decade of hands-on experience building performant, maintainable systems and developer tooling. Self-taught in many areas, he specializes in algorithms, performance optimization, and language-adjacent work such as parsers, compilers, linters, and a novel autocomplete data structure. He contributes to high-profile open-source projects like Zig—fixing and optimizing core sorting and data-structure implementations—and has applied similar rigor to game and platform tooling such as NevermoreEngine for Roblox. Recently focused on machine learning systems before joining Pinterest via the tvScientific acquisition, he also has practical experience shipping a yarn.lock parser in Zig for Bun.js. Based in Herriman, Utah, Niles combines low-level algorithmic insight with pragmatic engineering and an unusual bent for vanilla web and game UI work.
10 years of coding experience
1 year of employment as a software developer
Computer Science, Computer Science at Brigham Young University
Github Skills (13)
algorithm10
data-structures10
lua10
algorithms10
roblox10
zig10
game-development10
data-structure10
sorting-algorithms10
compiler-compiler9
heapsort9
compiler9
priority-queue8
Programming languages (18)
Github contributions (5)
Quenty/NevermoreEngine
Dec 2015 - Jul 2020
ModuleScript loader with reusable and easy unified server-client modules for faster game development on Roblox
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:140 commits, 56 PRs, 73 comments in 4 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Niles primarily focused on updating and refactoring the "os" module within the NevermoreEngine repository, adding and modifying functionality to align with Roblox's environment. Their work included renaming files, improving leap year checks, and optimizing time calculation algorithms. Additionally, the user implemented improvements in handling string formatting for date and time representations, and they addressed several efficiency-related code issues.
game-developmentrobloxserver-clientluanevermore
ziglang/zig
Jan 2021 - Jul 2025
Moved to Codeberg
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:5 reviews, 12 PRs, 64 comments in 4 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Niles primarily focused on improving the `zig` programming language's standard library, specifically related to sorting algorithms and data structures. Their contributions involved fixing bugs in the `pdqSort` and `heapSort` implementations, addressing integer overflow issues in `heapsort`, and optimizing the `isMinLayer` function within the `priority_dequeue` module. The user also added new sorting functions to the `MultiArrayList` data structure.
purposecompilertoolchainzigprogramming-language
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