Staff Software Engineer · IBM · Raleigh, NC

Hi, I'm Nick.

I'm a software engineer at IBM, working on NS1 Connect. Most of what I do is observability work: OpenTelemetry pipelines, dashboards, and the Go services that keep DNS records in sync.

What I work on résumé (pdf)
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01

What I'm doing now

NS1 Connect is IBM's managed DNS platform. My work is mostly instrumentation, so that when something breaks there's enough signal to see why.

Instrumentation

OpenTelemetry instrumentation that traces an event from queue to Route53 sync.

Dashboards and alerts

Honeycomb dashboards and SLO monitors that shorten time-to-notice.

Services

Go and gRPC services for distributed DNS sync.

02

Where I've been

IBM Raleigh, NC

Staff Software Engineer · NS1 Connect

Nov 2025 to now
  • Built OpenTelemetry instrumentation that follows an event from a messaging queue through daemon processes and AWS Lambdas into Route53 synchronization workflows.
  • Created Honeycomb dashboards, alerting workflows and SLO monitors that engineering teams use to spot problems faster.
  • Backend work in Go and Python, including gRPC services for distributed DNS synchronization between AWS Route53 and NS1.

Associate Software Engineer · Hybrid Cloud Mesh

Aug 2023 to Oct 2025
  • Built the observability layer for Hybrid Cloud Mesh, IBM's multi-cloud networking product, using Prometheus and Thanos to collect and store metrics across clouds.
  • Reworked core data models into a cache for 30% faster data retrieval, and tuned Thanos for high-cardinality metrics, cutting its memory use by over 50%.

Software Engineer Intern · Cloud Expert Labs

May 2022 to Sep 2022
  • Built authentication UIs in TypeScript, Next.js and Node.js against IBM Cloud Identity, plus Express REST APIs for MFA, password resets and email account recovery.
  • Automated retailer onboarding in Python, cutting manual work ~75%, and added Cypress E2E tests to CI/CD.
Leidos Reston, VA

Software Engineer Intern · Annex Intelligence Division

Jun 2021 to Dec 2021
  • Worked on secure web and mobile applications for the National Counterterrorism Center.
  • Refactored Elasticsearch indexing and query execution to speed up backend lookups.
  • Cleaned up Docker, GitLab and SonarQube pipelines for roughly 40% faster builds.
University of Pittsburgh Pittsburgh, PA

B.S. Computer Science · Honors

May 2023

03

What I work with

Observability
OpenTelemetry · Honeycomb · Prometheus · Thanos · Grafana · PromQL
Distributed systems
Kafka · RabbitMQ · gRPC · event-driven architecture · DNS
Cloud & infra
AWS (Lambda, Route53, SQS, EventBridge, EC2, S3) · GCP · Kubernetes · OpenShift · ArgoCD · Helm
Languages
Go · Python · TypeScript · JavaScript · Java · SQL
Data
PostgreSQL · Redis · Elasticsearch · MongoDB · Neo4j
AI tooling
Claude Code · Cursor · Codex · Wispr Flow · MCP · RAG · vector search · agent workflows

04

Things I've built on my own time

Peerfolio dark landing page with a friends' portfolio chart and league standings

01 · live · social investing

Peerfolio

Private investing leagues for your group chat, ranked by returns without sharing balances. Add your holdings by hand or compete with a fantasy portfolio, then see how your picks stack up.

peerfolio.org
YTRecap landing page: Watch less. Understand more.

02 · live · python flask

YTRecap

Summarizes a YouTube video by parsing its closed captions and passing them to an LLM. Built in 2023, in Python and Flask.

ytrecap.org
TinyOBS landing page with a metrics query and request-rate chart

03 · Go · open source

TinyOBS

A Prometheus-compatible metrics server written in Go, with PromQL, a Grafana-ready API, and a storage engine with cardinality and retention limits. One binary, small enough to read end to end.

nicktill.com/tinyobs

05

Come say hi.

Happy to talk about observability, distributed systems, piano, or where to go skiing.

github linkedin résumé