Director Systems Engineering

Director of Systems Engineering — Helix Aerospace Systems

Denver, CO | June 2020 – Present

• Led a cross-functional department of 24 systems engineers to deliver an autonomous drone tracking system 20 days ahead of schedule, utilizing Cameo for model-based systems engineering.
• Managed a $3.8M annual operational budget, optimizing team resource allocations and external software license vendors to reduce overall system costs by 15%.
• Established automated requirements validation scripts within IBM DOORS, reducing time-to-compliance analysis by 30% and eliminating 95% of manual tracing errors.
• Spearheaded the integration verification process for a complex aerospace telemetry project, improving interface testing throughput by 25% and saving 110 engineering hours.

Systems Engineering Manager — Stratus Defense Solutions

Boulder, CO | October 2015 – May 2020

• Directed a team of 12 engineering specialists to execute verification testing for a marine navigation system, achieving a 22% reduction in system integration failures.
• Negotiated statement of work parameters and technical performance measures with 3 primary hardware vendors, saving $140,000 in procurement and component costs.
• Designed a standardized interface control document structure using SysML models, accelerating cross-department design reviews by 18% and cutting change requests by 35%.
• Coordinated with product safety officers to execute safety hazards analyses on mission-critical systems, reducing compliance auditing time from 6 weeks down to 4 weeks.

Systems Engineer — Pinnacle Space Systems

Colorado Springs, CO | June 2012 – September 2015

• Authored 250+ system verification requirements and trace matrices in DOORS for satellite communications subsystems, resolving 42 interface design gaps prior to production.
• Developed automated MATLAB simulation scripts to model satellite orbit behaviors, reducing orbital determination processing time by 28% and saving 60 hours per mission sprint.
• Collaborated with electrical and mechanical design groups to resolve 18 critical assembly interfaces, improving system validation test accuracy from 84% to 96%.
• Constructed comprehensive failure mode, effects, and criticality analysis logs for 5 subsystem modules, decreasing post-delivery hardware failures by 32% over 2 years.

Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE), Systems architecture, Requirements engineering, System verification and validation, Risk assessment, Interface management, Lifecycle management, Configuration control, Safety hazards analysis, Failure mode effects analysis (FMEA), IBM DOORS, SysML, Cameo Enterprise Architect, Enterprise Architect, MATLAB, Jira, Confluence, Agile, Scrum

Autonomous Satellite Constellation Interface Standard

Role: Lead Systems Engineer

Tools: SysML, IBM DOORS, Cameo, Python

Led a 14-month project to standardize communications protocols across 8 satellite subsystems, finishing 3 weeks early and improving telemetry throughput by 32%.

Model-Based Verification Transition

Role: Director of Systems Engineering

Tools: Cameo Enterprise Architect, MATLAB, Jira, Confluence

Directed the 10-month migration of hardware-in-the-loop test plans to a centralized MBSE repository, reducing validation cycle time by 28% for a team of 40 developers.

• Expert Systems Engineering Professional (ESEP) (2022)
• AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional (2021)
• Project Management Professional (PMP) (2018)
• Certified Systems Engineering Professional (CSEP) (2016)

• Languages: English (Native), French (Conversational)
• Professional Memberships: International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE) member since 2012
• Availability: 4 weeks notice for executive transition