About

I'm Marius Nicola, a systems architect with 10+ years of experience building performance-critical applications in C#/.NET, Shopify, and distributed infrastructure. Verified Expert on Toptal — Top 3% in Engineering.

Based in Bucharest, Romania.

Problems I Solve

• Commerce platforms that have outgrown their original architecture
• Optimization pipelines relying on fragile cross-language subprocess dependencies
• Backtesting systems with hidden state and non-reproducible results
• Integrations that break under edge cases or production load

Engineering Philosophy

Performance is measurable. Speed is not a claim — it is a metric. Every serious system should expose throughput, latency, resource usage, and deterministic outputs. If it cannot be measured, it cannot be trusted.

Continuous systems over hard rules. Avoid brittle if/else logic when modeling complex behavior. Prefer smooth, parameterizable systems that can be properly optimized and validated.

Observability first. Without observability, performance claims are meaningless. Every system should log meaningful events, track metrics, surface failure modes, and make internal state visible.

Architecture before implementation. Define constraints and guarantees before writing code. Single Responsibility. Clear boundaries. Deterministic correctness.

Background

• Senior software engineer and systems architect
• Toptal Verified Expert — Top 3% in Engineering
• Core stack: C#/.NET, Shopify, SQL, API-first integrations
• 7+ years of Shopify architecture across complex, high-volume commerce environments
• Author of OptiSharp — a pure C# hyperparameter optimization library

What to Expect

Every engagement starts with design, not code. I measure before claiming, optimize before scaling, and prefer stable systems over fragile shortcuts.

Start a conversation about your architecture problem.