Niklas Vincent

Senior Software Engineer at Spotify

Leading technical initiatives within the moderation and compliance space, architecting scalable backend systems to meet evolving global regulatory requirements.

Software Engineer at Spotify

Worked as a full-stack engineer building and scaling platform integrity services, balancing high-throughput backend development with internal tooling and UI.

Backend Engineer at Monzo Bank

Founding engineer for Monzo's US expansion and a core contributor to the UK's payment architecture during a period of hyper-growth (500k to 4M+ customers).

• US Expansion: One of three engineers who built the technical foundation for the 2019 US launch, scaling the platform from zero to the first 2,000 customers.
• Payments Infrastructure: Designed and implemented new payment processors, including integrations for cash deposits and cheque clearing, replacing manual legacy processes with scalable internal systems.
• International Standards: Led the certification of an ISO 20022 integration with a European correspondent bank, enabling inbound SEPA payments as part of Monzo's SWIFT onboarding.

R&D Software Engineer at Nominet

Joined as the first software engineer on the research team developing TV White Space, a geolocation-based spectrum sharing technology. Modernised the codebase and led the engineering work to prepare the product for global rollout, including maintaining existing Ofcom certification, FCC certification in the US, and compliance with emerging DSA regulation. A key technical challenge was achieving sub-millisecond terrain lookups at global scale to power the real-time radio propagation calculations underpinning spectrum allocation decisions.

Software Engineer at The Guardian

Worked on the team responsible for user identity - sign-up, login, and account management - with a strong emphasis on security. Played a key role in migrating the team's infrastructure from on-premise to AWS, including the MongoDB cluster underpinning the identity platform.

Web Developer at D3R

Full-stack development for a range of clients, including Aspinal of London (e-commerce) and Fever-Tree. Also integrated the Sabre/SynXis hotel booking system for hospitality clients.

Analyst at JPMorgan

Part of the Athena Core team, responsible for the build system, CI environment, and runtime health of the bank's Python/C++ based Athena trading platform. Maintained the Python interpreter and library ecosystem across the platform and worked closely with quantitative teams to onboard new libraries into the production environment.

Moved to London

To take up on a job offer after graduating

Graduated with an MSc in Engineering, Nanoscience Engineering

For my master thesis, Simulations of III-V NWFET Double-Balanced Gilbert Cells with an Improved Noise Model, I designed mixer circuits using III-V nanowire transistors. The work has since been cited in two academic publications: Nanowire: Materials, Devices, Circuits, and Applications (CRC Press, 2026), where my results are used to demonstrate the high-frequency linearity potential of NWFETs; and K.-M. Persson's PhD dissertation (2014) on InAs nanowire MOSFETs (PDF).

Awarded the Agardh's Medal in Silver

Awarded by The Academic Society at Lund University for contributions to student life, including:

• Chief Information Officer, Radio AF (2009–2011) - Administered the IT environment for Lund University's student radio station, supporting 130 active users across Linux and Windows servers used for live broadcasting, audio production, and web services. Developed in-house tooling including a Perl/MySQL intranet.
• Broadcast Systems Engineer, Lundakarnevalen (2010) - Led the team delivering technical infrastructure for a 72-hour live broadcast at the Lund Carnival. Designed and built the radio studio used by 80 people throughout the event.
• Technical Director, DVD Compilation, Lundakarnevalen (2010) - Produced the official two-disc DVD for Lundakarnevalen 2010, handling all media encoding, menu integration, and quality assurance. Distributed to 5,000 people.

Won Best Business Idea in Venture Cup

Regional award for best business idea together with Nicklas Nygren. Our business idea was already up and running as a business: Kontxtr - a real-time Twitter screen for events.

Became part of Kvittar

Joined a team of seven to build Sweden's first platform for digital receipts. On June 21, 2011, we achieved a national milestone by sending the first official digital receipt directly from a POS system to the cloud. During my tenure, Kvittar was nominated for “Årets Näringslivsrookie” by Malmö Stad. I designed the core infrastructure and open API that enabled real-time data transmission from retail registers to a centralised platform, a project supported by a Vinnova “VINN NU” grant.

Joined Dreamhack Network Crew

Became part of the team that builds the infrastructure for the world's largest computer festival held annually in Jönköping, Sweden. The Winter 2013 event set a Guinness World Record for the largest LAN party ever, with 22,810 attendees. I also authored ipplan2sqlite, a tool that automated the conversion of plain-text IP plans into SQLite databases — enabling automated SNMP monitoring provisioning for all table switches and the generation of thousands of firewall rules across Linux, FreeBSD, and commercial appliances.

Founded Lindblad IT

My own company which served a wide variety of clients ranging from tech startups to government agencies whilst I was studying full time. Selected projects include:

• Hemma.mah.se (Mar–Jun 2012) - Built a WordPress-based rental advertisement system for Malmö University (a government agency). Handled the complete plugin architecture for property listings and user management. PHP, MySQL
• BoPoolen.nu (Jun–Sep 2011) - Developed a WordPress rental advertisement platform for The Cooperative Organisation for Student Unions at Lund University. Executed a live migration of all users from the previous platform, ensuring zero downtime and data integrity. The site serves thousands of users and remains a critical resource for student housing in Lund. PHP, MySQL
• Radio AF for iPhone/Android (Mar–Apr 2011) - Designed and implemented a custom API for the scheduling and broadcasting system used by Lund University's student radio. Built for parallel mobile applications on iOS and Android that display real-time song information and program schedules.
• Studentlund.se for iPhone/Android (Mar–Apr 2011) - Created a REST API for the Studentlund event calendar, enabling real-time event data delivery to mobile applications for iOS and Android users.
• Håtö Seglarskola (Aug–Sep 2010) - Built a WordPress-based website for a sailing school featuring custom registration management and administrative tools. PHP, MySQL
• Studentlund.se (Jan–Feb 2010) - Implemented the public website for Studentlund, a cooperation between student nations and academic societies in Lund. Features included automatic graphics scaling, an event calendar with Google Calendar synchronisation, and seamless Google Maps integration.
• Product Database for REHIFI.SE (Nov 2009–Jan 2010) - Built a custom in-house product database for an electronics retailer, designed for use by store employees and technical staff. PHP, MySQL

Started studying Nanoscience Engineering in Lund

A five year interdisciplinary engineering degree leading towards a MSc

Released Diagnosis, a WordPress plugin

Wrote and released Diagnosis at 16, a WordPress plugin that added a page to the Dashboard where site owners could see what their hosting was running: PHP and MySQL versions, server details, and live MySQL load statistics, each with a plain-language explanation and a link to the relevant Wikipedia article. Released under the GPL v2 and tested with WordPress 2.0 and up.

In 2013, WordPress core contributor Gary Jones rebuilt it for modern WordPress, crediting it as “predominantly based on the original Diagnosis plugin.” His version was distributed through the WordPress.org plugin directory, filling a gap until WordPress added its own Site Health tool in 2019, and reached version 3.0 before being archived in January 2026.

Became a Guru on the Gentoo Linux forums

Went from asking for help with my first Gentoo install to answering other users' questions daily on the Gentoo Linux forums, writing 474 posts and reaching Guru level. Published widely read tips on kernel modules, CFLAGS optimisation and fetching source packages, and ran a hardened Gentoo shell server at home. After logging brute-force scanners with an SSH honeypot, I wrote an experimental OpenSSH patch that rejected them based on their client version string.