Nikolai Golub / CV

Sovereign Labs / Senior Protocol Engineer / Apr 2023-Present

Building distributed infrastructure for a modular blockchain 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
• Designed chain re-org handling — fork selection, state rewind, finalization — enabling support for non-instant-finality Data Availability layers
• Owned Celestia data availability integration end-to-end — data publishing and correctness verification under ZK constraints, where bugs are silent and irreversible
• Built observability infrastructure from scratch (Grafana, InfluxDB, Prometheus) — process and host dashboards, OpenTelemetry traces, logging and alerts, enabling the team to meet customer SLAs

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 — generated ZK witnesses, integrated with Go prover and Solidity verifier. Took from proof of concept to production on PostgreSQL, Kafka, Kubernetes
• Improved execution throughput to 2K TPS via custom Merkle tree batching and parallelization. Rewrote ZK verifier parsing logic, reducing gas cost ~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 production incidents, led root-cause analysis through 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) — customer signup, invoicing, and operator payouts. Reduced payout preparation from over a week to less than a day. Python, Flask, PostgreSQL, AWS
• Built gig worker payout platform (Walkio) — direct payments to workers with tax-compliant fee routing as the platform scaled

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