Mission Operations Engineer
Interplanetary switchboard operator
I like space and I like computers, and this is where the hobby projects and half-finished tools that come out of that live.
01 / About
I grew up on a farm in the Blackdown Hills, did my physics degree in Portsmouth, and now live in Falmouth. I work shifts, which does interesting things to your relationship with daylight and mealtimes.
Outside of work I cook, play a lot of games, and watch more sci-fi than is strictly reasonable. Most of what ends up on this site comes from somewhere in the overlap between those and a longstanding habit of building things I don't strictly need.
I also live with an eighteen-year-old cat called Smarty. She is not interested in software.
02 / Experience
Currently I work deep space missions at Goonhilly. Mainly the job is operational: running passes, which means talking to spacecraft while they're in view of the antenna. The rest is software: Writing tools to help detect radio-frequency interference, and to support monitoring and control across the site.
Three years writing software for radar surveillance systems. Most of the job was getting useful information out of raw sensor data: improving detection accuracy, building the pipelines that stored and replayed it, and writing tools to make sense of proprietary data formats. I built a statistical method for filtering pattern-of-life activity, wrote real-time code to pull target positions off incoming data streams and tie multiple sensors together, and put together simulators for both data playback and target motion. Mostly Python and C++, with a lot of databases, networking and binary data in between.
Four years of physics, astrophysics and cosmology, which is where the space-and-computers overlap properly set in. The parts I liked were computational: I used machine learning to predict galaxy properties from the light they emit, trained on data from a simulated universe, then spent my final year on gravitational-wave research, using matched filtering and Bayesian inference to estimate the masses and distances of merging sources and test what future space-based detectors like LISA might be able to see. Signal processing and statistics doing the heavy lifting, which turned out to be reasonable preparation for RF.
03 / Skills
04 / Tools & Projects
Placeholder — some tools live at tools.alistair-matthews.com.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit sed do eiusmod.
Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris.
Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum.
Placeholder card. Duplicate an <a class="work"> block and point it wherever you like.
Another placeholder. Remove the soon class and add an href to make it a live link.