Nikolai Golub / CV

Celestia Labs / Senior Protocol Engineer / Jul 2026-Present

Joined through Celestia Labs’ acquisition of Sovereign Labs. ~30 engineers.

• Building agentic-payments engine in Rust — single-node prototype benchmarked at multi-million TPS, on internal testnet
• Designed replay-guard module — per-account nonce and deduplication of payment intents at multi-million TPS

Sovereign Labs / Senior Protocol Engineer / Apr 2023-Jun 2026

Built distributed infrastructure in Rust. ~8 engineers.

• Designed and built storage sub-system integrating new storage backend across full-node, prover and verifier — improved production throughput to 5K TPS under real customer load
• Debugged non-deterministic state-root divergence across nodes (storage-layer race) and built binary-search tooling to localize it. Operated Rust nodes in production for 3 years, including on-call and incident response
• Designed chain re-org handling — fork selection, state rewind, finalization — enabling non-instant-finality DA layers
• Owned Celestia data availability integration end-to-end — data publishing and correctness verification under ZK constraints
• Built observability infrastructure from scratch (Grafana, InfluxDB, Prometheus) — process and host dashboards, OpenTelemetry traces, logging and alerts

ConsenSys / Protocol Engineer → Senior Protocol Engineer / Oct 2021-Dec 2022

Built Rust execution subsystem for Ethereum rollup (pre-Linea). ~8 engineers (2 sub-teams of 4). Promoted in 8 months.

• Built Rust execution subsystem for Ethereum rollup (pre-Linea) — generated ZK witnesses, integrated with Go prover and Solidity verifier. Took from proof of concept to production on PostgreSQL, Kafka, Kubernetes
• Raised throughput to 2K TPS via Merkle tree batching and parallelization; rewrote ZK verifier parsing, cut gas ~4x
• Designed contract-based testing across Rust, Go, and Solidity — caught serialization mismatches and verified end-to-end proof correctness across the ZK pipeline

Booking.com / Software Developer / May 2017-May 2021

Backend development on high-traffic services serving millions of users.

• Built microservices integrating tours & activities providers — imported 50K-100K listings plus real-time availability across multiple APIs. Java, MySQL, Kafka
• Ran A/B experiments on booking and cancellation flows serving millions of users — reduced cancellation-related support tickets ~20%, increased transactions ~10%
• Operated highly available services — triaged incidents, led root-cause analysis via Booking's "Reason for Outage" process

Toptal / Software Developer / 2015-2017

Remote freelance development for startups via Toptal's network.

• Built automated billing and payout system for EV charging company (EverCharge) — signup, invoicing, operator payouts. Cut payout preparation from over a week to under a day. Python, Flask, PostgreSQL, AWS
• Built gig worker payout platform (Walkio) — direct payments to workers with tax-compliant fee routing

Devexperts, Dino Systems, Positive Technologies / Performance & Test Engineer / 2011-2015