Hendrik Nigul

Hendrik Nigul is an Estonian software engineer and former mathematics olympiad competitor. He represented Estonia at the International Mathematical Olympiad four consecutive years (1999-2002), earning a bronze medal in 2000 and silver medals in 2001 and 2002, and also competed at the International Olympiad in Informatics. He studied Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Tartu (2003-2007), where he worked on pattern matching and motif discovery from DNA sequences and competed in ACM ICPC. He has since built a career as a software developer across Estonian tech companies including Playtech, Nortal and Innovaatik Grupp, and currently works as a Senior Software Engineer at Starship Technologies in Tallinn, developing robot software in C++ and ROS.

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• Won silver at IMO 2002 (rank 99, 79.5th percentile, 23 pts) and IMO 2001 (rank 97, 21 pts), and bronze at IMO 2000 (rank 161, 15 pts) for Estonia - a four-year national-team run (1999-2002) that signals a top-tier mathematical foundation later applied to robotics and algorithm work.Jul 2002
• Career spans Estonian software shops Playtech (2009-2011), Nortal (2011-2014) and Innovaatik Grupp (2023-2025) before Starship Technologies, showing a steady move from web/mobile/SharePoint work toward embedded robotics; current robot-software role (C++, ROS, Databricks) is the most technically demanding stop.2025
• Competed at the International Olympiad in Informatics for Estonia as well as the IMO, pointing to an early dual strength in maths and competitive programming rather than pure theory.
• Studied Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Tartu (2003-2007), overlapping with ACM ICPC team participation, then worked as a software developer at the university doing DNA pattern-matching and motif discovery - the maths-olympiad background feeding directly into bioinformatics research.2007