Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering

Naperville North High school

Electrical Engineer at WindBorne Systems

Outsail Technologies built deployable wing sails composed of aerospace-style tape springs, providing up to 30% fuel savings at sea. 

Outsail completed YCombinator’s accelerator program as part of the W23 batch, raised $1.1M in pre-seed funding, and put multiple versions of our deployable wingsail on the water. The company grew to seven and signed $32M in LOIs in both the commercial and yachting space.

Outsail spun down in April 2024 after discovering unresolvable issues with our core technology.

Outsail Technologies

As an Autonomy Product Manager at Nuro, a company developing zero-occupant delivery vehicles, I was responsible for the product strategy of a portion of Nuro's autonomy stack.

In this role, I drove a comprehensive audit of the system's current state and deployment readiness. I informally led a small team of software engineers in the day-to-day work of improving simulation infrastructure. I also assembled an action plan to address potential issues found via improved simulation infrastructure.

Nuro

Product Manager, Autonomy

As the sole Product Manager at Momentus, a space logistics company, I worked with the team's Chief of Product to define successful products and services. 

In this role, I took responsibility for and defined the requirements of two successive Vigoride production blocks. To support these efforts, I built a set of software tools to map our vehicle performance to the quality of our rideshare services. I also engaged stakeholders across the organization to build a cohesive pricing strategy for our multiple service offerings, and drove a product strategy shift by conducting market analyses and presenting to the executive team.

Momentus

Product Manager

As an electrical engineer at Windborne systems, a company building and operating long-duration smart weather balloons, my responsibilities were to own manufacturing and test tooling PCBAs through design, fabrication, and bringup.

I additionally leveraged my product management skillset to drive a user interview effort that identified misalignments between the company's value proposition and the needs of potential users, and delivered competitor analysis and business case documents to guide those efforts.

WindBorne Systems

Electrical Engineer

As a Impossible Aerospace's first Product Manager, I worked to keep our cross-functional team aligned around user interests. This included defining the product strategy and roadmap for the US-1 drone and Air Support software service products, delivering product requirement documents with prioritized features and corresponding justifications, and managing a product improvement backlog based on user needs.

I was responsible for the requirements definition of our zooming camera payload, which after launch became our most popular payload option.

I additionally worked to project manage our product, service, sales, and marketing teams, and supported operations on a day-to-day basis by diving in and fighting fires as needed.

Impossible Aerospace

In my role as a Systems Engineer at Impossible Aerospace, I designed electrical hardware for US-1, owning multiple changes to the vehicle through design and production. I also performed system-level troubleshooting on the US-1 production line.

Systems Engineer

As an Avionics intern at Astra, I designed PCB hardware for an upcoming rocket. I balanced stakeholder needs across the company's product groups to define the requirements for an upcoming electromechanical system.

Astra

Avionics Intern

For my second engineering internship at Relativity, I prototyped propulsion systems and developed print parameters for an upcoming launch vehicle. This included leading our small team by influence to provide 24/7 coverage of early engine development prints.

Relativity

Propulsion Engineering Intern

As Relativity's first full-time intern, I designed, built, and tested flight-weight launch vehicle mechanisms for the Terran 1 rocket. This process included early requirements definition for the vehicle's thrust vector control actuators based on python modeling of the trade space. I also owned the creation of processes to safely and reliably use the company's DMLS additive manufacturing system.

Mechanisms Engineering Intern

As a founding member of the consulting startup Acronym , I provided high-velocity prototype development services to hardware startups.

Acronym

Lead Electrical Engineer

As Impossible Aerospace's first intern, I collaborated with the company's founder to refine early US-1 product requirements based on mechanical design and propulsion configuration analysis, and create concept renders for early pitch decks.

Aerospace Engineering Intern

As a Vehicle Engineering Intern with SpaceX, I designed and tested secondary structure for the Falcon 9 launch vehicle.  I owned bonded composite hardware end-to-end through design, qualification, and manufacture. I worked with build engineers, responsible engineers, and technicians on my team to understand their needs, designing tooling and hardware that would reduce the chance of installation errors.

SpaceX

Structures Engineering Intern

As a summer intern with the Starshade project at JPL, I worked to build a 34 meter carbon-fiber test truss, improve composite bonding and inspection processes, and design ground support equipment.

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

As an Engineering Intern at IMS, I was the primary owner of the I-Etek, a new product to perform ultrasonic non-invasive end of line quality analysis of brakepads. I designed prototype hardware and wrote Labview software, in addition to making system design decisions and trades.

Industrial Measurement Systems

Robotics Engineering Intern

As a summer intern working with the BETTII project, I worked alongside undergraduate interns to design hardware and write software for a balloon-borne infrared interferometer. I designed and produced geometrically dimensioned and toleranced machine drawings for vehicle secondary structure and translated scripts from Python to Labview.

Arpan Rau