BRIEF / Charter Space
Spacecraft Health Scoring and QA Tooling for Space Insurance
Senior Software Engineer · Jan 2026 - Present
Led a QA platform build, implemented spacecraft system-health scoring, and translated insurance stakeholder interviews into risk-scoring requirements.
- Domain
- Space systems & insurance underwriting
- Team
- Led development with 3 other engineers
- Migration
- Five-stage, flag-gated data transition
Context
Charter Space builds spacecraft engineering and risk-analysis software for the insurance side of the space industry. I joined as a senior engineer working across several repositories, with three threads of work: tooling to keep the engineering platform reliable, a spacecraft system-health scoring capability, and requirements for insurance risk scoring.
- Stage
- Space-technology company
- Team size
- Four engineers on the QA platform (I led development with three others)
The challenge
Scattered test signal: CI results lived in separate repositories, with no single view of regressions or recurring failures
Translating domain knowledge: Insurance and actuarial stakeholders described risk in their own terms, and spacecraft data had to be mapped onto it
Changing the data model safely: Legacy consumers had to keep working while the underlying data model changed
Trust and access: Test results and artifacts needed authenticated, fail-closed access and validated ingestion
What I did
Led an internal QA platform
Cross-repository CI analytics
- Consolidated CI test results into one regression-analytics view
- Added failure signatures to group recurring failures
- Built a plain-language bug board that syncs to the team's task tracker every 15 minutes
- Secured test ingestion and artifact access with fail-closed authorization and input validation
Implemented spacecraft system-health scoring
From snapshots to interactive breakdowns
- Persisted snapshots as the input to scoring
- Built feature extraction and a covariate registry feeding the score computation
- Computed system-health scores from those features
- Built interactive views that break a score down into its contributing factors
Translated insurance discovery into requirements
Stakeholder interviews and dataset analysis
- Worked from insurance stakeholder interviews and spacecraft dataset analysis
- Defined risk-scoring requirements for underwriting and actuarial-baseline development
- Defined signature-visualization requirements alongside the scoring requirements
Designed planning workflows and a safe data migration
Hierarchical tasks and staged transition
- Architected hierarchical task and requirements workflows with Gantt planning and role-based permissions
- Added issue-tracker import
- Authored architecture decisions for hierarchical workflows and data redundancy
- Shipped a five-stage, flag-gated dual-write transition with telemetry and fallback reads
Impact
One view of CI health
Regression analytics and failure signatures consolidated across repositories
Bugs readable beyond engineering
A plain-language bug board kept in sync with the team's task tracker every 15 minutes
Interviews turned into buildable requirements
Risk-scoring and signature-visualization requirements for underwriting and actuarial-baseline work
Data-model change without breakage
A five-stage, flag-gated transition kept legacy consumers working
Tech & architecture
- Next.js
- Data Modeling
- CI Analytics
- Access Control
- Feature Flags
- Data Migrations
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