Samuel Leathers

Summary

Samuel is a senior infrastructure engineer and technical leader with 20+ years of experience specializing in NixOS, distributed systems, and blockchain infrastructure. He led engineering and product at Input Output Global from first DevOps hire through Head of Product, driving Cardano's deployment architecture across every era, all mainnet hard forks, and on-chain governance via CIP-1694. He is the founder of NixEdge LLC and Se7en Labs, served as NixOS Release Manager for 19.09 and 20.03, and actively builds LLM-integrated developer tooling in Rust.

Experience

Cofounder - Se7en Labs | 2026

Providing consulting and development expertise for blockchain and technology spinouts.

Intersect Product Committee Chair - Cardano | 2024 - 2026

• Vision and strategy for Cardano community, running workshops around the world
• Founding Member of Intersect; member of CAB (Cardano Advisory Board)
• Established Core Roadmap Working Group, TWGs (Technical Working Groups), and SIGs (Special Interest Groups)
• Speaking engagements at multiple events including Cardano Summit

Input Output Global: Head of Product - Cardano | 2022 - 2026

• Technical strategy for Cardano; requirements and roadmap owner for CIP-1694 on-chain governance
• Member of design team that originally wrote CIP-1694; ran governance workshops in Longmont and Edinburgh
• Launched SanchoNet governance testnet with documentation site, onboarding 50-100 participants
• Weekly 1-on-1s with Input Output Global CEO demonstrating governance progress
• Helped establish architecture and deployment for Hydra Doom; represented it at conferences to hundreds of attendees
• Helped formulate original IO Engineering Mission/Vision/Values

Input Output Global: Head of SRE Department | 2019 - 2022

• NixOS-based deployment of all Input Output Global Cardano infrastructure; executed every mainnet hard fork
• Grew SRE team from 3 to 10 using Input Output Global hiring process; trained managers as team scaled
• Led multiple full-stack migrations of the NixOS deployment codebase
• Led rollout of ITN (initial stake pool testnet) and Cardano Shelley SPOs across hundreds of community members
• Managed on-call rotation via PagerDuty; annual reviews via Lattice

Input Output Global: DevOps Engineer | 2018 - 2019

• Built NixOS-based deployment system for entire Cardano production and testnet infrastructure since the Byron Era

Owner - NixEdge, LLC | 2018 - 2026 (concurrent with Input Output Global)

• NixOS consulting: custom module development, flakes migration, reproducible system deployments, infrastructure-as-code for clients

NixOS Release Manager - 19.09 and 20.03 | 2019 - 2020

• Prioritized pull requests and managed CI failures for two NixOS stable releases
• Assisted with backports to 19.03 for security patches; coordinated volunteers

AppliedTrust: DevOps Engineer | 2013 - 2018

• Configuration management, monitoring, and deployments for multiple clients

Penn State University: System Administrator | 2004 - 2013

• Linux/Mac system administration for Astronomy and Astrophysics Department

Technical Skills

Languages

• Nix / NixOS — 8+ years: flakes, flake-parts, overlays, custom modules, home-manager, package derivations, cross-compilation
• Rust — exegesis (document parsing), synaptex (DHCP/network tooling), agentix (LLM code indexing + bubblewrap sandboxing) — github.com/nixedge
• Haskell — Cardano PRs, CLI wallet development
• Python — wrote entire Catalyst stack for first fund
• Familiarity: C, assembly, C++

Config Management

• Colmena — primary tool for multi-host NixOS deployments
• NixOps, Puppet, Ansible

Monitoring

• Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, PagerDuty, DataDog, Nagios/Icinga, InfluxDB/Telegraf

Networking

• WireGuard — VPN mesh networking for home and production infrastructure

AI / LLM

• Local LLM inference via Ollama on NixOS infrastructure
• Claude Code for daily infrastructure-as-code and development workflows
• Agentix: code indexing pipeline with LLM integration; sandboxed tool execution via bubblewrap

Education

B.S. Computer Science; The Pennsylvania State University (University Park) | 2004 - 2011

Designing programming languages, Algorithms, Network Security

CMU Product Course | 2024

Product requirements gathering, pricing, forecasting

Input Output Global Haskell Course | 2024

Built simple API services and a CLI wallet

Plutus Pioneer Cohort 3 | 2022

Wrote basic Plutus contracts and executed them on-chain

QuviQ Haskell Quickcheck Training | 2019

Quickcheck generators and properties for property-based testing

RHCE | 2016

Linux System Administration using RedHat

disasm@gmail.com • +01 814 574 7307 • 4817 W Whitehall Rd - PA Furnace, PA 16865 - USA

github.com/disassembler • github.com/nixedge