Lead Engineer, Products & PlatformsDenver, Colorado

Kyle Gibson

By day I lead the product team behind the platform Blue Origin’s engineers use to design lunar landers.

At night I build robots in my garage.

Selected work

Blue Origin — Lunar Data, AI & Applications

Status: CURRENT

The platform my team built from scratch, which designs and simulates a lunar lander for ~300 systems engineers, plus the Claude agents that answer questions straight from its source of truth.

The hard part

Engineers were working from scattered spreadsheet copies with no source of truth, and the copies were causing design errors. The replacement holds data classified as CUI, so every row needs access control, every change needs a permanent history, and NASA's penetration testers need a sandbox of their own, all without that bookkeeping becoming the bottleneck.

The decision

One governed source of truth in AWS GovCloud, approved by Security and Export Control to manage CUI, on an event-driven architecture on Kubernetes so interdependent simulation jobs fan out instead of queueing behind each other. End-to-end simulation time fell by 40%.

  • Python
  • TypeScript
  • React
  • AWS GovCloud
  • Terraform
  • Kubernetes
  • DynamoDB
  • PostgreSQL
  • SQS/SNS
  • Datadog
  • Bedrock
  • MCP

~300 systems engineers · approved for CUI in GovCloud · 40% faster simulations · 2 production agents at 100% factual accuracy

Lead engineer, five-person team, 2024–present

AmigoWeGo

Status: RELEASED

Group trip planning that survives contact with a group chat.

The hard part

Several people edit one shared plan from a phone and a browser at the same time. Four questions have to stay answerable and consistent across both clients: what is the plan, who is where, what was decided, and who owes what.

The decision

Contract first. A single OpenAPI document generates both clients, so the Rust backend and the SwiftUI app cannot drift apart — the compiler catches a mismatch that would otherwise surface as a bug on somebody's holiday.

  • Rust
  • Axum
  • SQLx
  • PostgreSQL 16
  • PostGIS
  • Redis 7
  • React 19
  • SwiftUI
  • Terraform

When a group uses this app, they should always know:

  • What's the plan? - Today's activities and what's coming next
  • Who's where? - Where everyone is during the trip
  • What's decided? - Clear record of group decisions
  • Who owes what? - Expenses tracked and settled without awkward chasing
Product overview

Home Claw

Status: RUNNING

A family assistant that answers from any room and never leaves the house.

The hard part

A useful home assistant needs the family's schedules, preferences and medical information. Every product that does this well sends that data to someone else's servers.

The decision

Privacy as an architectural constraint rather than a feature. The Mac Mini M4 Pro is the only machine that runs inference, and it and both Raspberry Pi voice stations are running; the Jetson arm bridge is planned, not built. No cloud dependency, no subscription, nothing crossing the LAN boundary — which rules out the easy answer and makes model size a hardware problem.

  • MLX
  • FastAPI
  • pgvector
  • Raspberry Pi
  • Jetson Orin Nano
Home Claw architectureA dashed boundary labelled Home network contains a Mac Mini running local inference, two running voice stations drawn with solid outlines, a Raspberry Pi 4 and a Raspberry Pi 3, and one planned device drawn with a dashed outline: a Jetson Orin Nano bridging to a robot arm. No connection crosses the boundary. A legend records that a solid outline means the device is running and a dashed outline means it is planned.HOME NETWORK — nothing leavesMac Mini M4 Prolocal inference · knowledgeRunningRaspberry Pi 4voice · STT · TTSRunningRaspberry Pi 3voice · STT · TTSRunningJetson Orin Nanovoice · arm bridgePlannedrunningplanned — not built

The LAN boundary is the design: every component that touches family data is meant to sit inside it.

Architecture — dashed boxes are planned

The Observer

Status: TRIALS

A camera that keeps only the good photographs of the dogs.

The hard part

An all-day camera produces thousands of frames and almost no keepers. Detecting a dog is the easy half; deciding which frames are worth keeping is the actual product, and it is a judgement call.

The decision

A phased proof of concept where each phase has to pass a gate before the next one earns any time: frame in, dog detection, keeper scoring, portrait crop out. The ladder stops early if a rung fails, instead of arriving at a finished pipeline that produces nothing worth looking at.

  • YOLO
  • OpenCV
  • Pi Camera 3
  • Python
A Pokémon-style card of Luna, a brindle boxer sitting on a couch in window light, on a pale blue patterned frame.A holographic version of Luna’s card, the same boxer under a rainbow foil sheen and a gold border.A baseball-style card of Max, a fawn French bulldog looking off to one side, in a purple frame with Dude’s Dog House & Spa lettering.The back of Max’s baseball card: a season-and-career record table of visits, keepers and sharpness.
Cards The Observer has made from real keepers — Pokémon-style for Luna, baseball-style for Max.
This repo is the proof-of-concept ladder; each phase has a pass/fail gate before the next one earns any time.
Project plan

Quadruped

Status: PHASE 0

Four legs from nothing: hardware, control software, CAD, simulation, and eventually reinforcement learning.

The hard part

A legged robot fails where mechanical design, power delivery and control meet, and each of those can quietly destroy the others — a servo that browns out the controller looks exactly like a bug in the gait.

The decision

Classic control first and reinforcement learning later, across eight phases that each end in an observable exit test. The power maths and the battery safety rules were written down before anything was energised.

  • Fusion 360
  • Jetson
  • MuJoCo
  • Raspberry Pi
  • PCA9685
…the robot stands in a neutral pose holding its own weight for several minutes without servo overheating or brownout; full-system current stays within BEC/battery limits.
Project plan, Phase 3 exit test

The Sentry

Status: SEASONAL

An animatronic that tracks people up the driveway every October.

The hard part

Computer vision is soft real-time and servo control is hard real-time. Run both on one processor and the vision work steals the timing the servos need, so the head moves in visible jerks.

The decision

Split the two across processors. A Raspberry Pi is the brain and does the image processing; a Pico or Nano is the muscle and does nothing but precise servo and LED timing. The interface between them is deliberately narrow: the Pi sends simple commands over a serial link, and the Pico executes them.

  • OpenCV
  • Raspberry Pi
  • Pi Pico
  • Arduino Nano
  • Adafruit PWM driver
The Sentry's split-microcontroller architectureA camera feeds a Raspberry Pi doing image processing. The Pi sends simple commands over serial to a Pico, which drives the servos and LEDs in real time.Camera5MP day/nightRaspberry Pithe brainsoft real-time visionPico / Nanothe musclehard real-time servosservossimple commands
A Raspberry Pi will act as the "brain," handling all the complex image processing for object tracking. An Arduino Nano or Raspberry Pi Pico will act as the "muscle," receiving simple commands from the Pi and executing the precise, real-time control of the servos and LEDs.
Project plan, §1

How I work

Phases with exit tests

Every build gets a plan where each phase ends in a concrete, observable result. Nothing advances on the strength of feeling nearly done.

Constraints before code

The power budget before a battery is connected. The access and export rules before controlled data touches a server.

Honest status

Unfinished work is labelled unfinished, in the repository and on this page. A project that says Phase 0 is worth more than five that claim to be done.

Experience

Blue Origin

Lunar Data, AI & Applications

2024 – PresentNow

Lead Engineer

  • Built the platform from scratch after engineers said scattered Excel copies were causing design errors. It turns design parameters derived from requirements into technical performance measures for ~300 systems engineers across all lunar subsystems.
  • Lead a 5-person team owning product direction, architecture, and delivery, and turn requirements from Systems Engineering, Program Leadership, and Mission Planning into the roadmap.
  • Worked with Security and Export Control to get the system approved to manage CUI in AWS GovCloud under ITAR/EAR and NIST 800-171: row-level access control, full change history, and encryption across every event's lifecycle.
  • Defined penetration-testing infrastructure with NASA counterparts, giving NASA pentesters a sandboxed deployment on AWS WorkSpaces, and work with Blue Origin's NASA representative, who presents data from the system to NASA.
  • Put two agents into production on Claude (currently Opus 5.5) via AWS Bedrock. They answer design questions through MCP and purpose-built APIs, not model memory.
  • Held both agents to 100% factual accuracy with automated tests that check answers against known facts from the source of truth.
  • Led the team's adoption of agentic workflows and shared repository context, cutting the human effort spent debugging failed simulation and analysis jobs.
  • Designed the CI/CD and job pipeline (Python, Kubernetes, Terraform, Datadog) for interdependent simulation jobs, cutting end-to-end simulation time by 40%.
  • Promoted from Software Engineer III to Lead Engineer on the same program.
  • AWS GovCloud
  • CUI / ITAR
  • Claude on Bedrock
  • MCP
  • LLM Evaluation
  • Python
  • TypeScript
  • React
  • Terraform
  • Kubernetes
  • AWS
  • DynamoDB
  • PostgreSQL
  • SQS/SNS
  • Datadog
  • Data Visualization

Blue Origin

Platform Engineering

2022 – 2024

Software Engineer II/III

  • Built and operated core platform services used by all 10,000+ Blue Origin employees, including the user, file, and notification services, in Java and Python at 99.999% availability.
  • Built manufacturing services that track parts and every change to them, with event-driven search (AWS SQS/SNS, OpenSearch) and role-based access control across REST and GraphQL APIs.
  • Automated infrastructure with Terraform and Kubernetes and added Datadog monitoring across the services.
  • Java
  • Python
  • AWS
  • SQS/SNS
  • OpenSearch
  • Terraform
  • Kubernetes
  • Datadog
  • GraphQL
  • REST

Alteryx

Data Science R&D

2019 – 2022

Sr. Full Stack Software Engineer

  • Architected and deployed ETL orchestration pipelines (Apache Airflow/Prefect) to manage terabytes of data flows for model training and serving, supporting multiple internal ML applications.
  • Engineered scalable backend services using Rust and Python for data-intensive applications, including the development of full-stack applications with interactive D3.js/SVG visualizations.
  • Rust
  • Python
  • Apache Airflow
  • Prefect
  • D3.js
  • SVG
  • ETL
  • ML Pipelines

Giskard Labs LLC

Independent products

2026 – Present

Founder & Engineer

  • Took AmigoWeGo, a group trip-planner, from zero to the App Store as a solo engineer (about 20 users): Rust and PostGIS backend, React and SwiftUI clients generated from one OpenAPI contract.
  • Built sqllm, natural-language questions over SQL tables, with a 40-question evaluation comparing local models against Claude on a pass bar set before any run.
  • Rust
  • PostGIS
  • React
  • SwiftUI
  • OpenAPI
  • LLM Evaluation

Education

  • MS Computer Science — University of Colorado (In Progress)
  • Full Stack Immersive — Galvanize
  • BS Kinesiology/Physiology — University of Louisville