Justin Pearson’s Résumé

Note: This page prints cleanly to PDF, or you can download the PDF directly: Justin-Pearson-Resume.pdf.

See justinppearson.com for contact info, projects, and videos. For references, email me at justin.pearsonfoo@gmail.com.

Contents

• Industry Experience
• Education
• Teaching Experience
• Fun

Industry Experience

• Software Engineering Manager, AppFolio, 2021 – present
  • Manage and advise several cross-functional product development teams.
  • Highly rated by direct reports and superiors.
• Senior Software Engineer, Tech Lead, AppFolio, 2018 – 2020
  • Designed and built web-based real-estate property management accounting software.
  • Led a cross-functional team of Software Engineers, a Product Manager, User Experience Designer, and Quality Assurance Engineer.
  • Prioritized simple, practical designs, pair programming, and quick, iterative delivery of customer value.
  • Tech stack: Ruby On Rails, React, Javascript, and MySQL.
• Controls Engineer, AeroVironment, 2008 – 2012
  • Worked on the Global Observer: a high-altitude, long-endurance prototype spyplane.
  • Designed and implemented control algorithms in embedded C/C++ code to control the spyplane’s liquid-hydrogen power plant.
  • Deployed to Edwards Air Force Base for the 15-month flight-test campaign.
  • Debugged complex mechanical, electrical, and networked systems under time pressure.
  • Wrote data analysis tools in Matlab, Python, MySQL, and Bash.

Education

• Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering, UC Santa Barbara, 2012 – 2017
  • PhD Thesis topic: Designing control systems under bandwidth and energy constraints.
  • Towbes Fellowship recipient, recognizing academically exceptional first-year graduate students.
  • See website for PhD Dissertation video.
• M.S. in Mechanical Engineering, Stanford University, 2006 – 2007
  • Emphasis: Control Systems • GPA 3.79/4.0
• B.S. in Mechanical Engineering, UC Santa Barbara, 2001 - 2006,
  • Highest Honors • GPA 3.99/4.0 Major, 3.91/4.0 Overall

Teaching Experience

• Certificate in College and University Teaching, 2015
  • Companion program for PhD students to demonstrate superior competence and experience in teaching at the university or college level.
• Instructor of Record
  • ENGR 3: Intro to Programming, UC Santa Barbara, Summer 2015
  • COMP 150: Object-Oriented Programming, CSU Channel Islands, Spring 2016
• Robotics Internship Mentor
  • School for Scientific Thought, UC Santa Barbara, 2015
  • Dos Pueblos High School Summer Robotics Internship, UC Santa Barbara, 2015

Fun

• Presentations (See website for videos)
  • A program to play the “Set” card game, AppFolio tech talk, 2018
  • Tour of the Controls Lab at UC Santa Barbara, 2017
  • An Introduction to Mathematica and the Wolfram Language for Engineers, 2016
  • The Wide World of Control Engineering, 2015
• Projects (See website for code / docs)
  • Grumpy Justin’s Ruby Tutorial, personal project, 2020
  • Shortest-path grocery shopping, personal project, 2020
  • The Smile Machine, hack day project, 2017
  • Load-testing a Rails app on AWS Elastic Beanstalk, class project, 2017