Nicholas Wagner
Website: https://nwags.com · GitHub: https://github.com/nwags · LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicholashwagner/
Professional Summary
Financial engineering and AI/data systems builder focused on local-first research infrastructure, NLP/LLM pipelines, event-driven investing workflows, and quantitative dashboards. Experience spans Federal Reserve communication scoring, SEC filing/event extraction, portfolio-signal research, API/data quality engineering, and robotics/control software from the early Opentrons liquid-handling platform.
Education
University of Wisconsin–Madison — MBA, Finance
Lehigh University — B.A., Mathematics
Selected Projects
AI-Native Financial Research Infrastructure / m-cache Projects
- Building local-first Python research infrastructure for SEC filings, Federal Reserve communications, earnings calls, and news using normalized Parquet authorities, deterministic document identities, raw/parsed artifact tracking, and reproducible ingestion workflows.
- Designing shared CLI/API conventions across py-sec-edgar-m, py-fed-m, py-earnings-calls-m, and py-news-m to support event extraction, augmentation, provenance tracking, and offline research.
- Prototyping an AI-native event-driven investment workflow in which agents ingest public documents, extract structured events, generate trade candidates, run backtests, and produce experiment postmortems.
Federal Reserve Communication Scoring — "FedGPT"
- Built an acquisition and scoring pipeline for Federal Reserve/FOMC communication materials, including scraping, normalization, OpenAI Batch API job construction, model-output parsing, and score materialization.
- Produced structured policy-communication score families covering short-rate sentiment, long-rate sentiment, inflation, employment, credit conditions, economic growth, surprise, and policy phase.
- Connected scored communication series to a SolidJS/ECharts dashboard for sponsor-facing analysis of static-versus-dynamic portfolio explanations.
- Wrote a sponsor-facing technical report documenting the system architecture, scoring methodology, limitations from sparsity/serial correlation, and a staged continuation plan.
SEC 8-K Event Classification / Corporate Event Forecasting
- Parsed 15 years of S&P 500 8-K filings using SEC EDGAR tooling and custom parsing workflows; labeled filings into 14 material corporate-event classes including M&A and share repurchase.
- Trained a BERT-based classifier and backtested event portfolios against an equal-weight benchmark.
- Built filing-to-event research workflows connecting document parsing, labeled datasets, model training, and portfolio testing.
Relevant Work Experience
Lehigh University — Teaching Assistant, Introduction to Finance
- Conducted weekly recitations for approximately 30 students, reinforcing foundational finance concepts and quantitative problem-solving methods.
Infosys Limited — Quality Assurance Engineer, American Express Contract
- Designed and executed functional and regression tests for Java-based APIs; authored Postman suites and SQL validation queries to verify service behavior and data flows.
- Investigated API defects across request/response contracts, persistence behavior, and integration environments; contributed code-level review feedback and test-harness improvements.
Opentrons Labworks — Technical Co-Founder / Software Engineer
- Designed and implemented firmware and a Python API for the OT-1 liquid-handling robot, helping ship the product to more than 300 labs in 30 countries.
- Managed a small development team while integrating CI/CD and Agile practices into early product development.
- Helped secure a $7.2M seed investment by delivering a functioning prototype during HAX and Y Combinator Demo Day.
State of Wisconsin Investment Board — Fixed Income Analyst Intern
- Developed Excel/VBA tools for modeling Treasury spot rates.
- Assessed bond valuations and ratings by analyzing company financial statements, bond covenants, and fixed-income risk factors.
Additional Experience
Sweet Magnolia Churros — Co-Founder
- Co-founded a catering and farmers-market food business; handled licensing, vendor agreements, compliance, logistics, and event operations.
Energy Engineering and Controls — Project Associate
- Managed static-display aircraft restoration projects, including scope, schedule, vendor coordination, documentation, and safety-conscious field workflows.
Mathnasium — Math Tutor
- Delivered individualized mathematics instruction using the Mathnasium method.
Core Competencies
Programming & Data
Python, SQL, Java, C/C++, JavaScript/TypeScript, pandas, NumPy, scikit-learn, PyTorch, DuckDB, Parquet
ML / NLP / LLM Systems
LLM batch scoring, structured extraction, embeddings, prompt/version control, BERT classifiers, model evaluation, time-series signal research
Financial Analytics
Fixed income term structure, event-driven alpha research, factor models, portfolio attribution, Monte Carlo, backtesting
Cloud / DevOps / Tooling
AWS Lambda, S3, AWS Batch, Docker, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Terraform, Linux
Visualization & Reporting
SolidJS, ECharts, Streamlit, technical writing, sponsor-facing reports, dashboards