Flight Software Team Lead · Sr. Staff Software Engineer

Software engineer with 9+ years of experience building reliable distributed systems and leading technical projects. Based in San Marcos, Texas. [email protected] · github.com/nateinaction · linkedin.com/in/nate-gay

Experience

2023-Present - Flight Software Team Lead, Texas State University

Lead the Texas State flight software team contributing F´ (F Prime)-based development to the five-satellite PROVES program, an Open Source Space Foundation project, with three spacecraft on orbit and two scheduled for launch in October 2026. Define software architecture, coding standards, and verification strategy for mission-critical components, telemetry handling, and hardware-in-the-loop continuous integration. Mentor undergraduate engineers across development, code review, integration, and test infrastructure. Developed and tested a radio research payload flown on a high-altitude weather balloon mission.

2024-Present - Sr. Staff Software Engineer, WP Engine

Lead design and delivery of distributed platforms using Kubernetes and Crossplane, enabling product teams to provision and operate infrastructure self-service. Collaborate with architecture and SRE teams on standards for multi-cluster, multi-region reliability, security, and cost.

2020-2024 - Senior Software Engineer, WP Engine

Designed high-performance Kubernetes operators in Golang with gRPC APIs orchestrating WordPress hosting infrastructure across many clusters. Led cost-optimization work that reduced cloud spend by $12M annually. Interviewed, hired, and mentored engineers on a distributed team.

2017-2020 - Engineer, WP Engine

Built a serverless Python application on an AWS graph database that identified and cleaned up orphaned backups, saving $1M+ annually. Contributed to refactoring a large PHP monolith into microservices with CI/CD and observability. Began as an Enterprise Support Engineer diagnosing performance and availability issues for enterprise customers.

Selected Work

2026 - F Prime to Flight Faster, SmallSat 2026

First author on hardware-in-the-loop continuous integration for CubeSat development. Every commit to the PROVES flight software runs on a real engineering satellite before merge: 1,917 commits gated, 132 hours of hardware test runtime, 18-minute median commit-to-verdict. All hardware and software open source. Read the poster.

2022-2023 - Wildlife Occurrence Analysis, Texas State University

Organized and analyzed multi-source camera trap data with NumPy and pandas to map coyote and gray fox occurrence along a rural-to-urban gradient, supporting graduate thesis research in Wildlife Biology.

Awards

2023 - Tighten the Bootstraps, Hackathon, WP Engine

Led revival of a 2018-winning traffic queueing proxy, modernizing it for production use during traffic spikes.

2022 - Most Original Idea, Hackathon, WP Engine

Led development of an augmented reality app that gamified visits to WP Engine offices worldwide.

2020 - Biggest Dreamer, Hackathon, WP Engine

Led a team that created an immensely scalable Kubernetes-backed hosting platform with one million WordPress websites. Each website was fully functional and cost a fraction of a penny to operate.

2019 - Culture Award, WP Engine

For contributions in leadership and technology.

2019 - Best in Show, Hackathon, WP Engine

Led a team that produced a browser based shell environment allowing effortless SSH access to administer customer websites.

2018 - Game Changer, Hackathon, WP Engine

Created a web traffic queueing proxy in Golang which spread HTTP traffic equally among websites sharing the same server.

2017 - 1st place, Raspberry Pi Competition, WP Engine

Created a monitoring system for a self-sustaining aquarium.

2016, 2015 - Outstanding Service to the Spanish Program, Department of Foreign Languages, NC State

For maintaining relationships with Mexican Consulate General and Spanish language tax services.

2016, 2015 - Valued Service to the Mexican Consulate, Consulado General de México en Raleigh

Trained and managed student volunteers for the Mexican Consulate.

2015 - L.I. Felner Scholarship, Department of Foreign Languages, NC State

To fuel continued dedication to the Spanish language volunteer community.

2015 - Excellence in Community Service, Voluntarios Ahora en Raleigh (VOLAR), NC State

Collaborated with advisors, students, and community partners to create Spanish language volunteer opportunities.

2013 - Research Award, Office of Undergraduate Research, NC State

Secured a grant for cube-sat prototyping and in-orbit communications research.

Education

Texas State University — BS Mathematics, 2022-Present, 4.0 GPA

North Carolina State University — BA Spanish Literature and BA Political Science, 2012-2016, both cum laude

Licenses

Amateur Radio — FCC Technician Class, callsign KK4PDM (2013-Present). Operates ground stations for orbital and high-altitude missions.