About

I'm an electrical engineering graduate and an embedded software engineer on the phased array software team at SpaceX. I started as a computer science major, but realized I loved electrical engineering more, so I switched. Along the way I did work in fields I didn't enjoy and work in fields I did. A DSP software engineering internship at a defense company taught me to look for lower-level roles, so that's what I went after.

High school

In high school I was a really bad student. My grades were fine, A's and B's, but I didn't really care.

I did work, though. I spent a school year on customer service at Domino's, then taught elementary and middle school kids to code at Code Ninjas, mostly in JavaScript and C#.

I picked Colorado School of Mines because I wanted a small school with a strong reputation in engineering. I wanted rigor, but not a school that was deadly. It had to be worth spending tens of thousands of dollars on.

Freshman year at Mines

I started at Mines as a computer science major, because I liked programming, and my first semester came out at about a 3.8. That same fall I spent a semester as an undergraduate researcher in the Explosives Research Lab. It wasn't my field, and it was a start.

Then spring hit me with Calculus II, chemistry, and Physics I at once. It was the first time school beat me, and I finished that semester at about a 2.5.

I couldn't find an internship that summer, so I delivered flowers for two florists in Northern Virginia and took summer classes at the same time.

I'd recommend summer classes to anyone. They got me ahead, and later they gave me room to change majors.

Switching to electrical engineering

In my second year I decided to take circuits and digital logic in addition to my computer science core. They gave me a look at the hardware side, and I liked it more than I expected.

That's what eventually made me switch my major completely. Electrical engineering seemed like the most math-heavy subject that still let me move between physical engineering and software, and I loved the math.

That summer I worked as an office assistant and a substitute teacher for Fairfax County Public Schools. Neither had anything to do with my degree, but you do what you have to do to get experience.

Those jobs, and the ones before them, taught me to talk to anyone, from a six-year-old at coding camp to a Domino's customer, and how not to be the stereotypical engineer who can't talk.

Junior fall

Junior fall was my first full electrical engineering load, with feedback controls and signals and systems. I almost got straight A's, and that was when I knew the switch was right.

That fall I also joined the ePower Hubs lab as an undergraduate researcher, reading up on sensor systems and farm-level control for offshore wind and writing it up in LaTeX for a faculty advisor. I thought power was going to be my field.

In August 2024 I restarted a solar tracker I first built in July 2022. The first version followed the light every 2 minutes, and crudely. The restart reached a working sensor prototype, but the motors and housing never got built.

The co-op at Jordan and Skala

I took the spring of junior year off for a six-month co-op at Jordan and Skala Engineers in Denver. I found it, and the internship after it, through LinkedIn and the school's internal job board.

The firm does mechanical, electrical, and plumbing (MEP) design, and I was on the electrical side. From January to June 2025 I worked on apartment buildings and early data center layouts. That meant load and voltage-drop calculations, panel schedules, riser diagrams, and National Electrical Code review.

The co-op taught me a lot about what I don't enjoy in electrical engineering. Six months of power design told me it wasn't the field for me. I wanted something more cerebral, with more depth, and closer to the math I'd switched majors for.

That was worth the six months. A co-op you don't love still tells you where not to apply, and it still gives you bullets with real numbers in them.

The internship at Kratos

Right after the co-op ended, I started a software engineering internship at Kratos Defense in Colorado Springs. I worked on real-time digital signal processing (DSP) code in C++.

I pulled a 1.6x speedup out of a legacy signal chain through refactoring, profiling, and AVX-512 vectorization. AVX-512 runs one instruction on many values at once. I also built the team a logging framework.

That summer I fell for software engineering, and for low-level programming in particular. DSP has some of the hardest problems I've touched, and I learned I was good at this.

Embedded systems came along as a side effect. I still wanted work that used the physical side of my degree, and embedded software sits exactly there, so that's what I went looking for.

The unfinished solar tracker helped me get that internship. I showed Kratos my progress on it, because it proved I could build something on my own.

Senior year

I signed up for 19 credits in each semester of senior year, 38 in the year, to catch up.

I picked electives by what interested me, and didn't worry much about what looked employable. That meant digital signal processing, modern control, and CSCI 410, Elements of Computing Systems. It's the course many schools call Nand to Tetris, and it teaches the whole computer from the ground up. I also took a graduate course, EENG 519, Estimation Theory and Kalman Filtering.

Senior year ran on controls and signal processing, and I found I loved both. Tarek Al-Bakri, Brian Durland, and I built a 50 Hz discrete-time gantry crane controller, and I built EKF and UKF state estimation on my own, both in MATLAB. I also built the real-time MATLAB pipeline for an auto-tune pitch tracker, and pair-programmed its FFT and autocorrelation detectors with Jonas Krider. My capstone was a semi-active magnetorheological bicycle damper, and I owned its electromagnet design.

The courses kept showing up in the projects. I modeled the damper's electromagnet with the Biot-Savart law from electromagnetics, and its flux path used the magnetic circuits from electric machinery.

The internship showed up too. On a maze robot, our first I2C packets sent each value as an 8-byte double, but the Arduino only had room for a 4-byte float. I could debug that because the SIMD work at Kratos taught me a lot about registers and floating-point conversions.

I graduated in May 2026 with a bachelor's in electrical engineering and a minor in computer science. I could finish the minor because I had already spent about two years as a computer science major.

Getting to SpaceX

I sent hundreds of applications in the fall of senior year and tried everything to see what would stick. I found most openings on LinkedIn, and I applied to each one by hand, on the company's own site.

My early resumes weren't formatted properly, lacked the right language and skills, and didn't use a proper template. Then I found the LaTeX template on r/EngineeringResumes, which fixed all three.

One checkpoint I settled on by trial and error: if 20 applications bring zero interviews, stop and look at the method. I'd change the resume or the channel before sending 20 more.

I couldn't get a referral at SpaceX, so I applied cold, on the day the posting went up. A web scraper I built told me whenever a company I followed opened a new role.

The process was long, and it ran from September to November 2025. A recruiter first pitched me for power electronics, and the hiring manager moved me to software, which turned out to be exactly right.

SpaceX's mission is what sold me on the job, and it still does.

SpaceX

I started at SpaceX in July 2026 as an embedded software engineer on the phased array software team, and I love working there.

I've found that I love RF, or radio frequency engineering, even more than DSP and controls, because of how much math and physics it asks for.

About three months after I started, I referred several friends. A referral would have made my own process far easier.

What I took from the interviews is to be confident without being arrogant, and to never bluff. Explaining and defending my thinking out loud is still most of the job.

I'd add two things. Take extreme ownership whenever you can, the way I owned the electromagnet on my capstone. And give results anyone can understand the value of, such as a 1.6x speedup.

I started eeprep because people need help with their resumes. I built a system that worked, and eeprep is where I write it down.

Long-term plans

For now I want to get good at this work, embedded systems, RF, and signal processing, ideally somewhere I get to do research and development.

Next, I plan to go back for a master's in electrical engineering, focused on RF, GNC, or signal processing. Long term, I want to teach.

Before engineering

Before and during college I took whatever jobs I could get, from customer service at Domino's in high school to substitute teaching. Plenty of it had nothing to do with my degree, but when you have no experience, all experience is good experience.

• Customer Service, Domino's, Burke, VA. August 2020–May 2021. Part-time customer service for a school year in high school.
• Coding Instructor, Code Ninjas, Burke, VA. March–August 2022. Taught elementary and middle school kids to code, mostly in JavaScript and C#, starting while I was still in high school.
• Driver, Christopher's Flowers, Alexandria, VA. May–August 2023. Delivered flowers the summer after my first year at Mines, when I couldn't find an internship. I took summer classes at the same time.
• Driver, Flowers 'n Ferns, Burke, VA. May–August 2023. A second flower delivery job, the same summer.
• Lead Counselor, Code Ninjas, Fairfax, VA. May–August 2023. Led summer camps of up to 25 kids in 3D printing, circuits, robotics, and beginner Python and C#, and tutored students aged 6 to 14 in JavaScript and C#.
• Peer Mentor, Colorado School of Mines, Golden, CO. August–December 2023. Co-led a one-credit course that helped first-year students settle in, and led a group of new students through orientation.
• Calculus II Grader, Colorado School of Mines, Remote. January–May 2024. Graded Calculus II work remotely. It taught me how to teach, what goes wrong when students learn the material, and how to give feedback that actually helps.
• Substitute Teacher, Fairfax County Public Schools, Fairfax, VA. Freelance. Substitute taught four times, twice in the winter before the spring semester and twice after it.
• Office Assistant, Fairfax County Public Schools, Fairfax, VA. June–August 2024. A full-time office job with the school system the summer after my sophomore year.
• Differential Equations Grader, Colorado School of Mines, Remote. Spring–Summer 2024. Graded Differential Equations in Spring and Summer 2024, alongside Calculus II in the spring. The harder the subject, the better I got at giving useful feedback and at understanding problems deeply.