Professional role
Lockheed Martin Aeronautics
Two years building hardware-in-the-loop and full-simulation software for the F-35 and F-16, and automating the tests that clear an aircraft for its mission.
- Organization
- Lockheed Martin Aeronautics
- Role
- Software Engineer
- Dates
Simulation software
I built and maintained hardware-in-the-loop and full-simulation software for the F-35 and F-16 programs: designing, writing, testing, and debugging components, and working across teams to hold them to performance and quality standards.
Simulation is a strange discipline to start a career in. The software is not the product — the aircraft is — and the only reason the software exists is to be trusted about something you cannot afford to find out the hard way.
Automating the test environment
On the Automated Test Environment team I worked on extending how much of that testing could run without a person driving it, across the tools and simulations involved in getting the aircraft mission-ready.
The habit I took from it: a test you do not trust is worse than no test, because it costs the same and buys nothing. That has shaped how I think about evaluation gates on AI systems more than anything else I have worked on.