Over six months as lead technical architect, I designed and built the core of a UAV design optimization platform. The system lets users specify mission requirements — payload weight, flight duration, range, speed — and automatically generates optimized fixed-wing drone designs by selecting from catalogs of real components and optimizing airframe geometry. My contributions spanned the genetic algorithm at the heart of the system, the FastAPI backend, the entire AWS cloud infrastructure, and the shared type system that kept six-plus repositories in sync.
Highlights
- Designed a novel KD-tree–based component selection mechanism that treats each component as a point in multi-dimensional parameter space, enabling O(log n) nearest-neighbor lookup from catalogs of 1,000+ components per category.
- Implemented variable-length chromosomes supporting 2–4 batteries, 1–3 motors, and 4–6 sensors with crossover and mutation operators that intelligently handle differing parent component counts.
- Integrated six evaluation modules (Component Validation, Placement, Final Validation, CFD Surrogate, High-Fidelity Validation) into a penalty-based fitness function that balances cost minimization with mission requirement satisfaction.
- Built the FastAPI backend with Server-Sent Events (SSE) for real-time progress streaming during multi-hour optimization runs, AWS Batch integration (16 vCPU / 32 GB Fargate tasks), and dual Aurora PostgreSQL databases.
- Managed 150+ Terraform resources across VPC, ECS Fargate, AWS Batch, Aurora, S3, ECR, Secrets Manager, and Cloudflare Zero Trust/Access, with S3-backed remote state and GitHub OIDC authentication.
- Established the shared `bnt-common` type system (Pydantic + SQLModel) and introduced the UV package manager with a private AWS CodeArtifact registry across all repositories, enabling 10–100× faster dependency resolution.
- Coordinated five to fifteen engineers across six-plus specialized repositories through architecture documentation, OpenAPI specs, code reviews, and regular cross-team syncs.
Technology
- Python 3.11
- FastAPI
- DEAP (Genetic Algorithms)
- scikit-learn (KD-tree)
- SQLModel / SQLAlchemy
- PostgreSQL / Aurora Serverless v2
- AWS Batch · ECS Fargate · ECR · S3 · Secrets Manager
- Terraform (150+ resources)
- Docker (multi-stage builds)
- Cloudflare Zero Trust
- GitHub Actions (OIDC)
- UV · AWS CodeArtifact
- Optuna (hyperparameter optimization)
- Alembic (database migrations)