guest@guest:~$ cd ~/about
guest@guest:~/about$ cat about.txt
About Me
Hi, I'm Paul. I'm a software engineer with experience building aerospace software systems, full-stack applications, and simulation tooling. My work has spanned deployment and configuration management systems for vehicle software, enabling reliable software release and updates for operators running live hot fire tests, as well as full-stack tooling (Python/FastAPI/SQL, Rust/Axum, React/TypeScript) and simulation infrastructure supporting hardware-in-the-loop (HITL) and hardware-out-of-the-loop (HOOTL) testing. I hold an M.S. in Computational Physics where I specialized in Monte Carlo simulation on high-performance computing (HPC) clusters and numerical methods for dynamical physical system modeling. Thank you for visitng my website, feel free to take a look at some of my recent projects below as well as the source code for this site.
Skills/Programming Languages:
Rust
Python
C++
React.js
guest@guest:~/about$ cd ~/experience
guest@guest:~/experience$ cat experience.txt
Experience
Software Engineer (Contract)
January 2026 – Present
Independent Contractor | Costa Mesa, CA
- Sole engineer responsible for the architecture and implementation of a full-stack Python/FastAPI/SQL platform for ingesting, reconciling, and analyzing data from multiple external systems.
- Designed automated and operator-assisted reconciliation workflows to resolve inconsistent records, preserve traceability, and prevent silent data loss.
- Built structured logging, diagnostic tooling, health monitoring, and automated validation pipelines to support reliable operation and rapid debugging.
- Developed geospatial analysis capabilities enabling user-defined regions and custom statistical computations over large datasets.
Software Engineer I | Vehicle Software (Mission Assurance & Vehicle Simulation | Test, Release & Deployment Engineering)
July 2023 – December 2025
Relativity Space | Long Beach, CA
- Owned the software configuration management and deployment platform for the full vehicle software lifecycle, enabling safe, repeatable software release and updates used by engineers and operators in live test environments.
- Designed and executed HITL validation procedures for vehicle software verification, supporting release readiness and system-level behavior testing under operator-defined requirements.
- Developed Rust-based hardware abstraction and reverse drivers from datasheets to enable HOOTL simulation environments for embedded software, accelerating early integration testing and defect discovery prior to hardware availability.
- Built a Python/FastAPI/SQL backend service for managing vehicle network packet schemas, improving the scalability of software configuration across engineering teams.
- Developed a full-stack deployment application (Rust/Axum + React/TypeScript/Vite/MUI) used by operators at test stands to manage and execute vehicle software release workflows.
Graduate Assistant/Teaching Associate
August 2019 – May 2022
CSULB Physics Department | Long Beach, CA
- Mentored students in developing and debugging computational physics simulations in Python, emphasizing numerical methods and software correctness.
Physics/AP Physics Teacher
August 2016 – June 2019
Saint Monica Catholic High School | Santa Monica, CA
- Taught experimental physics and data analysis, guiding students through quantitative modeling, statistics, and interpretation of measurement data.
guest@guest:~/experience$ cd ~/projects
guest@guest:~/projects$ cat projects.txt
Projects
RTOS Pedometer
February 2026 - May 2026
- Implemented RTOS-based firmware on an STM32F767ZI for real-time pedometer tracking, driven by MPU-6050 data-ready interrupts and multi-threaded sensor-processing pipelines.
- Developed a step-detection algorithm using filtered acceleration magnitude, zero-crossing peak detection, hysteresis, and timing constraints to reduce false positives.
- Architected inter-thread communication with lock-free queues and event signaling to maintain deterministic execution under real-time workloads.
- Built automated host-side and hardware-in-the-loop test tooling in Python, including firmware flashing, validation, and telemetry capture.
- Developed debugging infrastructure for streaming live DSP data over USB and visualizing intermediate processing stages during algorithm tuning.
Kaggle: CMI – Detect Behavior with Sensor Data
August 2025 - September 2025
- Analyzed ~8,000 wearable-sensor sequences for an 18-class gesture classification task, identifying sensor dropout patterns and orientation-related effects that complicated model generalization.
- Built an IMU-based feature pipeline combining temporal segmentation with statistical and frequency-domain features derived from FFT analysis.
- Trained and tuned a LightGBM baseline using Optuna and stratified cross-validation, establishing a reference point for future multimodal and sequence-model approaches.
- Investigated signal-processing techniques including gravity removal, spectral filtering, and orientation normalization to improve robustness across subjects.
Netwatcher CLI
May 2025
- Built and published a Python CLI that correlates live network connections with the local processes responsible for them, providing real-time visibility into outbound system activity.
- Combined process inspection with IP geolocation, ASN, and ownership lookups to surface context about remote hosts directly in the terminal.
- Developed automated threat heuristics and HTML reporting to highlight potentially suspicious network behavior for further investigation.
- Packaged the project for PyPI and built it with a typed, test-driven Python workflow using Typer, Pydantic, Pyright, Ruff, and pytest.
MIT iQuHack 2025: IonQ Challenge
January 2025 - February 2025
- Introduced XX and YY coupling terms alongside the original ZZ formulation and tested their impact on optimization performance, improving results from roughly 0.70 to 0.90 on selected instances.
- Worked with teammates on further Hamiltonian and ansatz improvements, reaching approximately 0.94 on several benchmark runs.
- Turned a collection of Jupyter notebooks into a modular Python package, making it easier to iterate on Hamiltonian designs, circuit structures, and evaluation code.
Demo Video
Mean-Variance Analyzer
October 2022 - March 2023
- Developed a progressive web app (PWA) for financial portfolio optimization with React.js deployed on Gatsby Cloud
- Gathered, cleaned, and modified financial market data with IPython/Jupyter and Pandas
- Ensured accuracy of linear algebra functions across updates with unit tests utilizing Jest
- Designed custom UI/UX with CSS modules and incorporated requests from multiple code reviewers via Git
- Lighthouse report - Performance: 100, Accessibility: 97, Best Practices: 100, SEO: 100
Master’s Thesis: A Systematic Method for Constructing Realistic Potentials in Real Space for Use in Fractional Quantum Hall Monte Carlo Simulations
January 2020 - September 2022
- Distributed multi-threaded calculations across nodes of a high-performance computing (HPC) cluster via C, MPI, and Linux
- Cleaned, visualized, and analyzed data with IPython/Jupyter, Numpy, Pandas, Matplotlib and SciPy
- Constructed scheme for incorporating novel effects into simulations of systems studied for quantum computing applications
Wolfram Physics Project: Rules Generating Elementary Particle Behavior in the Wolfram Model
December 2020 – January 2021
- Generated hypergraph defect evolutions via Wolfram programming language and utilized machine learning to find clusters
- Established framework for discovering rules which induce particle-like motion in topological defects on a hypergraph
- Selected to join exclusive collaboration of international researchers where project was awarded Staff Pick
guest@guest:~/projects$ cd ~/education
guest@guest:~/education$ cat education.txt
Education
Online Courses/Certifications
- Master.Dev (Formerly Frontend Masters): Intermediate React, v6 (07/2025), Complete Intro to React, v8 (07/2025)
- LinkedIn Learning: Advanved Rust: Managing Projects (06/2023), Rust Essential Training (06/2023), Advanced NLP with Python for Machine Learning (01/2023), Parallel and Concurrent Programming with C++ (12/2022), C Programming for Embedded Applications (12/2022), Advanced Linux: The Linux Kernel (12/2022), Linux Device Drivers (12/2022), Become a Full-Stack Web Developer (10/2022), Tableau and R for Analytics Projects (02/2022), Learning Assembly Language (12/2021), Ethical Hacking: Scanning Networks (08/2021)
- Udemy: Financial Engineering and Artificial Intelligence in Python (01/2022)
- Certifications: Certified LabVIEW Associate Developer (01/2021), Wolfram Certified Level II in Multiparadigm Data Science (07/2020, Source Code)
California State University, Long Beach (CSULB) | Long Beach, CA
Degree Conferred: August 2022
Master of Science in Physics, Computational Physics Option, GPA: 4.00
- Awards/Honors: Google Summer Research Assistantship, Graduate Dean’s List of University Scholars and Artists (top 1% of graduate students in the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics)
- Mastering Computational Physics (PHYS 562): Numerical simulation of physical systems using ODE/PDE solvers, Monte Carlo methods, optimization, and linear algebra (LAPACK), with applications in quantum mechanics and scattering problems.
Loyola Marymount University (LMU) | Los Angeles, CA
Degree Conferred: August 2016
Bachelor of Science in Physics, Minor in Applied Mathematics
- Awards/Honors: Dean’s List, LMU Achievement Award, Sigma Pi Sigma