About

Hi, nice to meet you! I'm Nikolai

I’m an Avionics Hardware Development Engineer at Varda Space Industries, where I maintain and develop in-house GNC sensors for the Varda Bus and design custom electronics and instrumentation for pharmaceutical manufacturing. I hold a Master of Engineering in Electrical and Computer Engineering and a Bachelor of Arts in Physics, both from Cornell University. My background spans embedded systems, sensor design, physics-based modeling, and data analysis.

What I’m focused on

Wrapping up my in-house GNC sensor project at Varda — qualifying it for flight, finalizing the associated procedures and documentation, and laying out the in-flight validation plan. Transitioning next into pharmaceutical payload research and development. In parallel, working with a coworker to build an internal AI assistant for hardware development that makes our design cycle at Varda more efficient.

Reading & tinkering

• Photography around California — out with the camera most weekends
• Side projects with Claude Code (including this site) — picking up multi-agent patterns along the way
• Local LLMs and hardware — curious where the two overlap and what it's actually good for

Not reading much these days — heads-down on the project, sorting photos, traveling.

Elsewhere

I enjoy going on adventures in the wilderness with a camera by my side.

Some of my other passions, in no particular order: photography, content creation, UAVs, electronics, programming, martial arts, languages, playing the guitar, and of course this website.