Andrew Powell

Senior Software Engineer

Professional Experience

Sierra Nevada Corporation [Contract]
2025 - Present
Software Engineer III
Englewood, CO
  • Developed Adaptive Command and Control System for Unmanned Air Vehicles using C++ and C#
  • Completed prototype service within first 3 weeks of joining team, ensuring demonstration was ready for large management audience
  • Leveraged multiple UAV messaging standards (OMS and STANAG4586) to provide adaptive control capabilities
  • Collaborated with team of engineers to design service-based architecture complying with MOSA initiatives
  • Created robust CMake build system complete with dependency management using Conan, automated testing and static analysis, and Docker container generation
General Dynamics Mission Systems [Full-time]
2023 - 2025
Senior Software Engineer
Remote - Denver, CO
  • Developed distributed, fault-tolerant backend services written in C++ capable of handling node failures while maintaining high performance, reducing service downtime by 60%
  • Implemented data ingestion capabilities, aggregating data from lightweight distributed data collection agents and ensuring up-to-date data availability
  • Designed and implemented scalable resource-oriented service APIs, supporting needs of 10+ dependent systems
  • Created GitLab CI/CD pipelines to automate building, testing, static code analysis, and deployment of backend services
General Dynamics Mission Systems [Full-time]
2020 - 2023
Software Engineer
Pittsfield, MA
  • Led software development efforts for modernization of shipboard diagnostic tool
  • Modernized legacy UI, rewriting applications using Python Flask, htmx, and css
  • Implemented GitLab CI/CD pipeline with Ansible playbooks and Docker container generation to automate system deployment

Projects

MapReduce Framework [Georgia Tech]
2024
  • Developed distributed, multi-threaded data processing framework deployed in Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) using Go, gRPC, etcd, and Azure Blob Storage
  • Implemented master node failure handling using etcd to ensure long-running data processing tasks are unaffected by node failures
  • Leveraged Go concurrency model and Kubernetes pod scaling mechanisms to improve processing time for large datasets
  • Created interface for users to provide data processing algorithms and datasets to use within framework
  • Optimized framework to process 1GB+ dataset in under 5 minutes, improving execution time by 65% compared to baseline implementations
Software Defined Network Controller [Georgia Tech]
2024
  • Designed and implemented various SDN routing algorithms, such as Shortest Path and Proactive Widest Path, to reduce latency and optimize network link utilization + Incorporated dynamic network topology discovery for the SDN Controller using third-party event APIs + Implemented handling for dynamic topology changes during runtime + Leveraged third-party APIs to program network switches in the topology consistent with the configured routing algorithm

Technical Skills

Programming Languages
C++ Python C Go C#
DevOps & Build Tools
Docker Kubernetes Gitlab CI/CD Github Actions CMake Conan Sonarqube Ansible
Operating Systems
Linux (RHEL, Ubuntu, Alpine) Green Hills INTEGRITY RTOS VxWorks
Systems Engineering
Model-Based Systems Engineering Cameo UML Design SysML Design

Education

Georgia Institute of Technology
2023 - Present
M.S. in Computer Science - Computing Systems Specialization (4.0 GPA)
Master
University of Virginia
2015 - 2019
B.S. in Computer Engineering
Bachelor