Hi, I'm Nico 👋🏻

A decade spent reverse-engineering Akamai, Cloudflare, and the rest of the anti-bot industry from the outside. Now building hardened firmware for Class II medical devices on the inside. UCLA computer science. Based in Irvine, California.

Currently: shipping embedded firmware for medical devices at EnChannel Medical ; writing on security, philosophy, and politics.

Adversarial systems research → hardened firmware. Red team, then blue.

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Work Experience
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  • Jan2026 - Now
    EnChannel Medical, Inc.
    Senior Build Engineer (Backend)
    • Reduced medical-device software build times from ~60 minutes to ~5 minutes (~12x) by re-architecting the build pipeline and distributing work across a fleet of self-hosted runners.
    • Containerized the build toolchain in Docker for deterministic builds across developer workstations and CI — driving toward full byte-level reproducibility for IEC 62304 verification and FDA submission.
    • Implemented SPDX SBOM generation and audit in CI covering every release artifact, aligned with FDA premarket cybersecurity guidance and traceable to upstream CVEs.
    • Designed and operate CI/CD systems with deliberate focus on security and efficiency, distributing builds across self-hosted infrastructure under chain-of-custody and access-control constraints appropriate for regulated device software.
    • Operate within FDA-regulated and IEC 62304-aligned medical-device software lifecycle constraints — traceability, reproducibility, and audit-readiness across every stage of the build and release pipeline.
  • Jan2024 - Jan2026
    Independent Research & Applied Security
    Self-Directed Study

    Operated distributed scraping infrastructure for clients remotely. Locally, spent time with organizations advancing free and open-source software, particularly Futo.

  • Jul2021 - Jun2024
    Automatiq
    Senior Software Engineer
    • Drove ~$5M annual revenue attributable to capture-rate improvements I owned on the scraping platform.
    • Joined as the second platform hire; rebuilt a fragile collection setup from a handful of EC2 boxes into an enterprise-grade distributed platform sustaining 10M+ daily collection events across Ticketmaster, AXS, and SeatGeek.
    • Reverse-engineered and bypassed Akamai Bot Manager, PerimeterX, and Datadome, maintaining capture rates through repeated vendor updates that took competitors offline.
    • Led the migration from monolithic EC2 to containerized AWS Fargate, cutting infra cost ~60% via auto-scaling and reducing deploy cycles to <5 minutes.
    • Designed the company’s “transferless” resale primitive, eliminating the ownership-transfer step that gated competitor business models and opening a new revenue line.
    • Built fault-tolerant, event-driven pipelines on SQS + Lambda + DynamoDB with circuit breakers, exponential backoff, and DLQ-based retry; owned on-call rotation for the scraping platform.
    • Stood up observability stack (CloudWatch, Datadog, Logflare), establishing a 1-2 hour post-detection MTTR on a platform that previously had no formal incident-response baseline.
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Let's Connect

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