Todd Nowacki
Senior Staff Software Engineer at Mysten Labs
United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolTodd Nowacki is a Senior Staff Software Engineer with 13 years building low-level virtual machines and compiler infrastructure, currently shaping core Move language tooling at Mysten Labs. He brings deep expertise in VM internals, bytecode design, and type systems from significant contributions to projects like Diem and the Move repo, including adding bytecode instructions and refining the borrow graph and type layouts. At Meta he led Move-related efforts and earlier product infrastructure work, combining research-grade rigor with production-grade engineering. Known for migrating and modernizing toolchains (e.g., adopting clap v3 and transactional test frameworks for Sui), he bridges systems architecture and developer tooling. Collected experience from Carnegie Mellon to industry informs his methodical approach to correctness, performance, and API design. Outside the obvious, he has a knack for translating intricate compiler invariants into maintainable APIs that enable higher-level platform features.
12 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science - BS, Computer Science, Bachelor of Science - BS, Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University
Github Skills (32)
algorithm10
algorithms10
compiler-development10
testing10
verification10
data-structure10
lang10
compiler-design10
code-generation10
bytecode10
blockchain10
data-structures10
smart-contracts10
move10
rust10
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
diem/diem
Jul 2019 - Dec 2021
Diem’s mission is to build a trusted and innovative financial network that empowers people and businesses around the world.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:959 reviews, 289 commits, 280 PRs in 2 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Todd contributed significantly to the Diem blockchain project, focusing on core VM and file format enhancements. Their work involved replacing bytecode instructions, such as `Assert`, with `Abort`, modifying the bytecode verifier, and adding new bytecode instructions, showcasing a strong understanding of the low-level aspects of the Move VM. Additionally, the user implemented and tested new functionality for equality and non-equality comparison operations over the values, and the code generation for function and struct definitions.
diemfinancialtrustedethereumblockchain
move-language/move
Jul 2022 - Jan 2023
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:363 reviews, 27 commits, 119 PRs in 5 months
Contributions summary:Todd primarily contributed to the Move language's core functionality, focusing on the Move Virtual Machine (VM) and compiler. Their work involved enhancing the type system, specifically with fully annotated layouts for Move types. They also addressed issues related to compiler optimizations, fixed bugs in the instantiation loop checker, and improved the efficiency of borrow graph updates. Furthermore, they exposed and updated various APIs related to type tags and layouts.
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.