I am a Cloud Engineer working at Viasat Inc, an industry-leading satellite communications company based in San Diego, CA.
Previously I was a Full Stack Engineer and Managing Partner at Asher Chaim, a technology-driven real estate brokerage in Phoenix, AZ. Also with experience in the
financial sector, I previously worked as a Quantitative Developer at HeliosMI, a derivatives-based hedge fund.
I'm a 2022 graduate of the Master's Program for Computer Science at the University of Chicago, also studying at
Barrett the Honors College at Arizona State University where I graduated cum laude with a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science and a minor in Business.
I am always open to new experiences, whether that is learning a new tool, working in a new field, or moving to a new place. I pride myself on my ability to quickly learn new
things and work with people from all walks of life to build innovative, high-quality stuff.
Nicholas L. Maheshwari
Denver, CO
nicholasmaheshwari@gmail.com
Cloud/Software Engineer • June 2022 - Present • http://www.viasat.com
While completing my graduate degree from the MPCS program at UChicago, I became greatly enamored with the future and possibilities around cloud technologies, and by the time I graduated, I had decided I wanted to pivot my once finance-and-real-estate-based career towards this new interest. After a thorough job hunt, I determined that Viasat, the industry-leading satellite communications company, was the best environment for me to learn the ins and outs of a global, enterprise-scale cloud tech stack. Working for a satellite company appealed to my love of space, a fondness inspired by uncle, Charles Pevsner, a renowned astrophotographer (check out some of his awesome shots here).
Since I joined Viasat in June 2022, I have developed several large-scale automation tools, including a Golang, gRp, and protobuf based DNS & IPAM management system that significantly reduced the company's network operations workload, along with a Typescript, React, and Vite web application GUI to act as its customer facing interface. I also built several integrations and programs to provide automated onboarding and / or server operations for various enterprise SaaS applications, such as ServiceNow, Jira, Outlook, and Slack using dozens of various programs and tools such as Python, Golang, Terraform, Ansible, Github Actions, Jenkins, and Bash for automating AWS, Azure, GCP, and Openstack cloud or bare metal server operations.Managing Partner• May 2017 - June 2022 • http://www.asherchaim.com
Having just finished my undergraduate degree, I found myself working for the real estate brokerage Asher Chaim, a tech-forward real estate firm in Phoenix, as a junior software engineer. I was initially tasked with writing web scraping programs in Python and building out an SQL database to contain the scrapped data, but my job quickly evolved into designing and building the company's current website. With next to zero web dev experience, I accepted the challenge. In just under 2 weeks, I taught myself the essentials of Javascript, HTML, and CSS and had a basic website deployed (via Digital Ocean). In the weeks that followed, I added more advanced web forms with spam bot detection, data collection routing directly to an external CRM as contacts, and moved the website’s deployment to Netlify (for Github support and simpler deployments). Today my project is still the primary company site, and has been expanded wildly. In my free time during this project I designed a few more new-age logos for the company, mostly for fun, which I jokingly pitched at the end an all-hands meeting. It was decided that we hold a new-logo contest, and after the final tally, my initial design was picked as the company's new primary logo. For all of these combined efforts, and my willingness to throw myself completely into any new opportunity the company had, I was promoted to Full Stack Software Engineer and was made a Partner with the company, in a role where I continued to lead the development of business crucial applications while also interviewing and onboarding new hires to the company. While I ultimately decided to step away from real estate and Asher Chaim in 2022 to pursue a career as a cloud engineer, I will always remember my Asher Chaim days fondly and appreciate all the opportunities granted to me while I was there.
Quantitative Developer • May 2018 - August 2021 • https://www.heliosmi.com
Helios MI is a quantitative trading fund that focuses on using the newest software innovations to maximize the returns from derivatives trading. At HeliosMI, I used Java and C# to design algorithmic stock and option trading strategies, connecting to Interactive Broker's REST API. I collaborated in development across the entire trading framework, from the data pipeline, to the trade execution software, and to the active asset management system. I worked directly with market analysts on the formulation of several trading strategies, researching and building a strong foundation in stocks, options, and the inner workings of financial markets. I also acquired a much deeper knowledge of Java and it's ecosystem including Spring Boot, Maven, JUnit, Hibernate, etc. In the past, I have back-tested stock trading algorithms using QuantConnect, mainly using C# and Python (also see, Stock Trading Quantified in my Portfolio), and back-tested option trading strategies using Interactive Brokers Trader Workstation, utilizing their paper-trading capabilities.
Master in Computer Science • Fall 2020 - March 2022
University of Chicago is considered to be the birthplace and breeding ground of quantitative finance thanks to famous professors such as Eugene Fama (portfolio theory, efficient market hypothesis) and alumni such as Cliff Asness (AQR Capital), Andrew Alper (Goldman Sachs),and Roger Altman (Lehman Brothers). As a Master's student at this prestigious university, I honed my programming skills and diversified my backgroud by taking courses over a wide range of subjects (seen below).
Courses Taken: Databases, Cloud Computing, Advanced Computer Architecture, Applied Financial Technology, Blockchain, Full Stack Software Engineering, Intro to Computer Security, Algorithms, Python Programming, Discrete Mathematics
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Minor in Business • Fall 2016-Spring 2020
Barrett, the Honors College at Arizona State University was named “Best Honors College” in the nation by both PrepScholar and College Transistions, and has more National Merit Scholars than MIT, Duke, Brown, Stanford or the University of California-Berkeley. Barrett demands a deeper commitment to learning, requiring students to work with faculty to complete several advanced projects on top of their regular coursework, culminating in a thesis project, similar to a Master's thesis, in which a student has to form a faculty commitee to help guide them towards a successful defense of their thesis project. Information on my thesis project, "Stock Trading Quantified" can be seen in the 'Portfolio' section of this site.
-Deans List: Spring 2017, Fall 2017, Spring 2018, Spring 2019, Fall 2019, Spring 2020
-Graduated cum laude in May 2020 with a 3.58 GPA
All my life I've been a fast learner, and have enjoyed experiences working in a variety of environments, whether that be individually in a more fast-paced setting, or as a team in more collaborative workspaces. As a leader, I try to bring the best out of everybody, encouraging everyone to speak their mind and facilitating any technical debates. As a team member, I work hard to fill my role and provide advice or assistance to anyone that needs it, and I'm not afraid to share my opinion if I believe the team is going in the wrong direction.
Technical Skills:
•Software Development & Engineering: Python, Golang, TypeScript/JavaScript, Java, C#, C++, C, SQL, React, HTML, CSS, Tailwind, REST, gRPC (protobufs), Postgres
•DevOps & Cloud Infrastructure: AWS (Route 53, S3, Elastic Beanstalk, Lightsail, MongoDB, DynamoDB), Azure (AD, VMs, AKS, Azure Functions, Sentinel), OpenStack, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, Git (as well as Github Actions & GHAS), Jenkins, Ansible, ArgoCD, Postman, Okta, OAuth, Netskope (ZTNA)
My honor’s thesis was an exploration on the principles and popular strategies of algorithmic stock trading. Throughout my research I focused on exploring high-frequency trading algorithms, mainly because these are the types of algorithms that are employed at Wall Street hedge funds, and also the type I worked on at HeliosMI. Using QuantConnect, a backtesting platform for trading strategies, I developed my own version of three distinct algorithms; a momentum based strategy, a mean reversion based strategy, and a preferred time of day based strategy, all in C#. In my thesis report, I go in depth on each of these strategies, explaining the philosophy behind the strategy, delving into the code that makes up the strategy, and discuss the backtest results. The report also discusses the history of algorithmic trading, and explores some future research aspirations of mine.
My senior year at ASU, I was placed on a Capstone team whose job was to complete a project for NASA’s Psyche Team. Our Capstone team was assigned to create two simulations for NASA Psyche’s Inclusive Mindset course, which aims to inform users about the benefits of diversity and teamwork in the workplace. These simulations are meant to engage the users, giving them a hopefully more appealing way to learn the lessons being taught in the course. Throughout the year as a team we worked in sprints using Java and Javascript to develop these simulations.
Having just finished my undergraduate degree I was working for the real estate brokerage Asher Chaim as a junior software engineer. I was tasked with designing and building a website, and with exactly zero web dev experience, I accepted. In just 2 weeks I taught myself HTML and CSS and had a basic website deployed. In the weeks that followed I added web forms with spam/bot detection and data collection routing directly to an external CRM as contacts. In my free time during this project I designed a few logos for the company, mostly for fun, one of which was picked as the company's primary logo. For these efforts I was promoted to lead software engineer and was granted partner rights. Since then I have taken over the company's tech stack, and have made countless updates to the company site.
This project models a simple (non-distributed) blockchain, with auto-generated transactions set to a fixed amount. Within the program, Merkle Trees are contrustructed from these transactions by a mining node. The mining node attempts to find a nonce that can be appended to the Merkle Root of the tree and SHA-256 hashed to be less than a set difficulty level (itentionally set low since this project is just for demostration). When found, a block is created and added to the blockchain with the transactions used to generate the Merkle Tree, with the Merkle Root of the tree being used as the block identifier (stored within the block's header). The Merkle Root of the previous block is also stored in the block's header as a reference, allowing for quick and simple validataion of the entire chain. The next steps to this project would be the distribution of the mining node code (likely via docker) as well as a registration node, and the introduction of a wallet application for non-mining nodes to create transactions. This project was created for Introduction to Blockchain at University of Chicago.
This Vaadin project uses Deezers Music Search API to concurrently return a pagable, infinite scroll (until all results have been scrolled) list of cards, providing feedback with 'Loading' and 'Done loading' messages. It takes in a search term as a query and implements paging by using an index (25 results per'page'). This project impliments a toggle-able menu with the music search tab and the about app tab.
This project also implements AWS Cognito User Pools to handle user sign in/out, and utilizes a docker container hosted on AWS Lightsail that contains a Quarkus microservice which connects to a MongoDB to manage different user's 'Favorites'. Finally, this project uses AWS SES (deployed via AWS Lambda and called through APIGateway) to send an email from the signed in user (or default@default.com if Cognito Validation is turned off) to me through the 'Contact' section of the 'About' page. A diagram of the program structure is shown above.
This is a relatively simple Android application that implements OMBD's API to search for entertainment. It is a multi-tiered application, consisting of a model tier, a view-model tier, and a view tier. There are a few POJO models to represent the JSON data returned by the API calls, and two different views, one for the search screen and one for the item details screen. The model-view layer of the stack passes data between the layers and performs any backend logic.
During my third year at Viasat, I was the lead engineer for the ServiceNow Integration Team, designing several GHA and Terraform based integrations for ServiceNow that allowed for automated onboarding and configuration to
various SaaS applications such as Netskope and Rancher. The typical flow for these integrations were as follows; a customer would submit a request in ServiceNow, the assigned team would approve the request,
a REST API call would be made to a Github Action, which would perform the appropriate action, whether that be creating a yaml declaration of an AWS or Azure resource which would be created
with Terraform, or onboarding a private app to the security and networking SaaS Netskope. During my tenure on this team, I ran dozens of design sessions with fellow engineers, and was the main point of contact with the
3rd party developers whom we needed to work with to properly set up the integrations.
Note: Because this is proprietary Viasat-owned code, I am not at liberty to share any actual code details of the project like I am for my own personal or school projects.
During my second year at Viasat, I was tasked with assisting in the development of an internal, self-service DNS & IPAM CLI management tool for Infoblox. This tool was written in Golang,
utilizing gRPC w/ protobufs to generate client libraries in various other languages. This tool became widely used across the company and eventually led
to a 85% drop in network ops load as we designed dozens of programs that utilized this tool to automate the most common network requests and operations. During my time on this project I worked very
closely with several of my fellow engineers, working well as a team to delegate and work together to complete the project over a month ahead of schedule.
Note: Because this is proprietary Viasat-owned code, I am not at liberty to share any actual code details of the project like I am for my own personal or school projects.
Shortly after the initial release of the aforementioned Golang + gRpc + protobuf management tool for Infoblox, I co-developed a Typescript, React & Vite web application that acts as the GUI for the tool.
This webapp has the capability to display, group, and search for services, and uses OAuth and Okta to provide user authentication for logging into the portal. Also features many quality of life features
such as a light/dark mode, an FAQ page, form validation and detailed success and error messages upon API requests to the service backend.
Note: Because this is proprietary, Viasat-owned code, I am not at liberty to share any actual code details of the project like I am for my own personal or school projects.
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