Parth Mittal — Flight Software & Systems Engineer

109→67 kBflight image after rebuilding a chipsat’s entire flight stack, while adding watchdogs, a flash log and a settings block
2papers: AIAA JAIS (second author, under review) and SPIE 2026 (published)
4engineering roles: Cornell SSDS, Spin Drift, MIT Lincoln Lab, Phi Dynamics
50k+PyPI downloads of my open-source libraries

Publications

Multi-Objective Optimization of Computation Offloading in Space Systems under review AIAA Journal of Aerospace Information Systems · 2026 · second author of 4 · wrote the computational core

code for the offloading paper: github.com/ThePrivatePanda/compute-location-moo ↗

The Roman Coronagraph Community Participation Program: Target Database and Tools published SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation 2026 · arXiv:2608.17152 · built the Python query client

Featured work

ChipSat Flight Software two launches this semester

Cornell Space Systems Design Studio · flight + ground software · C++ on STM32, Rust on the ground

A chipsat is a gram-scale, single-board spacecraft. Hundreds are released near 100 km and transmit telemetry over LoRa the whole way down. I rebuilt the flight software from an Arduino sketch into a CMake project on STM32, and rewrote the ground software that configures and flashes the boards.

Three layers, with one interface per peripheral and two implementations behind each, so drivers could be ported one at a time against a build that still flew.
Six device drivers written against datasheets, replacing vendor libraries whose bugs I traced by reading their source: one reported failed I2C writes as successes and retried forever.
Flight logic tested on a laptop against mocks for every vendor library, because there is no spacecraft on my desk.
One encoder feeds both the radio and the flash log, so the live downlink and the on-board record cannot disagree.

architecture & design decisions →

Experience

Fall 2026 Flight Software EngineerCornell Space Systems Design Studio Rebuilt the chipsat’s entire C/C++ flight stack and rewrote its ground software. Cut the flight image from 109 kB to 67 kB while adding features, and replaced buggy third-party libraries with in-house implementations. Nov 2025 – May 2026 Research InternSpin Drift Technologies Built a from-scratch C++23 visual-inertial odometry stack for GPS-denied drone flight. Evaluated 5 off-the-shelf VIO/SLAM systems and replaced them with a CPU-only pipeline that streams 6-DoF pose to PX4 at 30 Hz. Sep 2024 – Apr 2025 Networks LeadMIT Lincoln Laboratory · SOCOM Ignite Led networks on a 5-person team building a covert short-range radio protocol for the US Navy across 2 hardware generations, running one stack on 3 MCU platforms. Summer 2025 Research InternPhi Dynamics Wrote an LLVM pass and a C++ constraint-graph path solver for a path-exhaustive fuzzer, and pinned the toolchain in a custom Guix channel for bit-identical builds team-wide.

more roles, teams, and lab work under experience →

Also building

MSPoker in active build

solo · design + implementation · Rust + Python

Heads-up poker is effectively solved; multiplayer poker is not. MSPoker studies the open coalition version of the problem: one agent controls several seats at a table and plays them as a single joint player that provably weakly dominates the same seats playing independently.

Rust game engine (PyO3) with integer chip accounting and chip-conservation invariants.
A 1.4M-parameter seat-attention network trained as a DREAM/CFR blueprint, fine-tuned with KL-anchored PPO.
Real-time CFR+ search with a coalition range gadget that computes team counterfactual values jointly.
Built spec-first against about 155 verifiable tasks, with human-signed phase gates.

architecture & design decisions →

Skills

Languages: C++ (C++23), C, Rust, Python
Embedded & flight: STM32 / ARM Cortex-M, flight & ground software, MAVLink v2 / PX4, NRF24 radios, Raspberry Pi, RP2040
Autonomy & ML: visual-inertial odometry, sensor fusion, OpenCV, CFR / game theory, reinforcement learning (PPO), PyTorch
Systems & tools: LLVM, Linux, Git, Docker, Guix, raw TCP/WebSocket networking, pytest / Hypothesis