Nathan Handler

2024 Distinguished Alumni Service Award

Nathan Handler earned his bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of Illinois in 2015. While a student, he served as treasurer of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and was a CS Student Leadership Council (CSSLC) member. He also helped to found and direct HackIllinois, the largest student-run hackathon in the Midwest, and Sail, which provides high school students the opportunity to learn about the field of Computer Science and discover all that Illinois has to offer. 

After graduating, Nathan began working at Yelp as a Site Reliability Engineer. There, he was one of the maintainers of PaaSTA, the open, distributed platform as a service built on Apache Mesos, which powered all their microservices.  

In 2019, he joined the startup Orchid Labs, where he helped launch their decentralized bandwidth marketplace built on top of the Ethereum blockchain and get their ERC-20 listed on the top exchanges. 

In 2020, Handler joined Reddit as a Site Reliability Engineer on their Video team. He was part of the core team behind the r/place project, where he won a Webby award. Most recently, Nathan has transitioned to working as a Security Engineer, where he helps to keep Reddit's infrastructure secure and drives key initiatives around identity and access management and compliance.