Nate is the Flight Software Team Lead at Texas State University’s Space Lab, a contributor to PROVES — the Open Source Space Foundation’s open-source CubeSat program. He leads the Texas State team building F´ (F Prime)-based flight software for the five-satellite PROVES program, which has three spacecraft on orbit today and two scheduled for launch in October 2026. He defines the software architecture, coding standards, and verification strategy his team works to, and mentors the undergraduate engineers who build it.

His current focus is making flight software verification fast enough to keep up with the hardware. Nate built the hardware-in-the-loop continuous integration pipeline that deploys and exercises every commit on a real engineering satellite before it can merge. That work is the subject of F Prime to Flight Faster, presented at SmallSat 2026. All of the hardware and software involved is open source.

By day, Nate is a Sr. Staff Software Engineer at WP Engine, where he designs distributed platforms on Kubernetes and Crossplane that let product teams provision and operate infrastructure safely. Over nine years there he has built Kubernetes operators in Golang, led cost-optimization work that cut cloud spend by $12M annually, and led four winning hackathon teams.

Nate holds an FCC Technician Class amateur radio license (KK4PDM) and operates ground stations for orbital and high-altitude missions. He is completing a BS in Mathematics at Texas State, and previously graduated cum laude from NC State with BAs in Political Science and Spanish Literature. While there he served as President of the Commercial Space Club, securing a research grant for CubeSat development and organizing radio and satellite communication training for 15 engineering students, and as Volunteer Coordinator for the Mexican Consulate General, where he trained and managed 40 multilingual student volunteers.

Nate lives in San Marcos, Texas with his partner and their three-legged rescued min-pin, Chippy.