Nicholas "Niko" Matsakis is a Senior Principal Engineer at Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the co-lead of the Rust language design team. Widely recognized as one of the principal architects of the Rust programming language, he has played a pivotal role in its development since 2011, helping shape its type system, borrow checker, compiler, and overall language design.

At AWS, Matsakis leads engineering initiatives focused on advancing Rust for cloud infrastructure, helping drive the adoption of memory-safe, high-performance systems programming across AWS.

Prior to joining AWS, Matsakis was a senior researcher at Mozilla, where he made foundational contributions to Rust during its formative years. He earned a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and later completed a Ph.D. at ETH Zurich, specializing in programming languages and compiler technology.

A frequent speaker and contributor to the programming languages research community, Matsakis is known for his expertise in type systems, compiler implementation, concurrency, and language design. Through his technical leadership and open-source contributions, he continues to influence the future of systems programming and software safety worldwide.