Nicholas Pacheck

Willing to Work 80 Hours + and Weekends (Its Fun)

DTC Starlink FSW Engineer (CO-OP) - SpaceX

Full Time

• RE for 40k+ lines of code with ownership across board level firmware for all boards in DTC payload.
• Brought up 3/3 new DTC v2 PCBAs.

Starship Crew Electrical Engineer (CO-OP) - SpaceX

• RE for the High Power MPPT converter that charges Starship's battery through solar panels. Completed schematics.

Starlink Gateway Engineer (CO-OP) - SpaceX

• RE over a ultra low phase noise signal generator.
• Learned how production is done at scale, and how to design PCBs that pass HASS, Radiation, TVAC, and Vibe Testing

Radar Beamforming Engineer - Naval Surface Warfare Center

(2022-09 - 2024-05)

• Contributed SLAD: a lane of maintainable and documented code to Naval Fleet Radar Analysis codebase to analyze arbitrary Planar Phased Array Beamformer used on fleet, commercially.
• Improved code efficiency by parallelizing Signal Processing, Beamforming, and Kalman state estimation using multi-processing
• Researched and implemented Adaptive Nulling Beamforming algorithms for counter radar jamming
• Experienced with Spectrum Analyzers, Signal Generators, Oscilloscopes to test RF Amplifiers, Attenuators, Splitters, Filters, and Phase-Shifters

Lead Hardware Engineer - TMPG

Lead a team of 4 hardware engineers in Software-Hardware USART communication protocol integration

• Designed and Tested six versions of a PCBs used for Power-Management, Motor-Control, and Pill Environment Monitoring.
• Wrote 20k+ lines of embedded firmware over two generations of the product and PCBs
• Wrote and maintained an internal python codebase used to automate testing and analyze reliability
• Implemented BASH automations to deploy and maintain embedded firmware remotely from user
• Implemented a Basic Real-Time Operating System using a FSMs whose state transitions are facilitated by USART interrupts

Radar Hardware and Software Engineering Intern

(2022-08 - 2023-09)

• Completely designed and prototyped a Beamforming DOA Radar system using Software Defined Radios integrated with FPGAs for low-level Embedded Systems control which interface with a Sailor friendly python GUI.
• Wrote 10k+ lines of Python to control radar system which also automatically analyzes results
• Developed seven different methods of Beamforming each with its own atmospheric and tactical advantages
• Wrote combined 5K lines of Verilog and C used for low-level control SDR Control
• Achieved synchronous Impulse Quadrature sampling between antenna elements and obtained spatial covariance matrix
• Researched Wideband Superheterodyne Receiver Architectures, Direct Down-Conversion, IQ Samples

Organized and directly led USRP at scale event for a total of 2500+ students in real communities + Bogota, COL.

B.S. - Electrical Computer Engineering and Theoretical Mathematics Minor - Virginia Tech

A.S. - Electrical Engineering - Germanna Community College (2023-05)

Graduated - Courtland High School