Nikolas Kilian

I’m a Software Engineer with 5 years of professional experience and 3+ years of production Rust. My work spans embedded firmware, systems programming, backend services, and GPU kernel optimization.

Most recently, I built complete LLM billing infrastructure—including an API proxy, auth, payment processing, and rate limiting—using Rust, Axum, and PostgreSQL. I also implemented a speculative billing approach that estimates costs as AI responses stream, helping prevent users from exceeding spend limits.

For years, I’ve delivered end-to-end embedded solutions for wireless interactive hardware. I designed PCBs and wrote firmware (C++, then Rust) for ESP32, replacing the Bluetooth/MQTT stack with the ESP-NOW protocol, and building an OTA firmware update system from scratch to eliminate physical flashing.

Beyond embedded and backend, I enjoy pushing performance and tooling forward—replacing legacy parsers to cut analysis time from minutes to milliseconds, optimizing ML kernels in Rust, and reimplementing systems-level components like a work-stealing async executor and a small native compiler.