Nicholas Matsakis is a Senior Principal Engineer at AWS and co-lead of the open source Rust language design team. He has worked on Rust since 2011, and led the design of its “secret sauce”, the borrow checker. He has played a number of other roles in Rust over the years, such as being a member of the Rust core team, the lead of the Rust compiler team, and helping to launch the Rust Foundation. Prior to working on Rust, he completed a PhDat ETH Zurich and did his undergraduate study at MIT.