What I am looking for
An engineering or technical referent role in civil or military aviation,
space or defence. Two kinds of position interest me, and they do not have
the same cost of entry.
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Those where my experience applies as is.
Ground segment, test benches and simulation, industrial information
systems, in-service support, tooling and the software delivery chain.
There, I arrive with twenty years of trade.
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Safety-critical embedded software.
There, I have no professional experience. I have been preparing for it
since August 2026 — see the next section — and I know I would start
lower.
The sector's constraints — real time, operational safety, confidentiality,
compliance — are not foreign to me: seven years in a regulated and
audited banking environment, and seventeen years before that on
platforms where downtime was not an option.
Aviation goes back to childhood; the military world is somewhat
familiar to me.
French citizen, eligible for defence security clearance. Native French,
professional English — seven years in English-speaking teams.
What I have done to prepare for embedded
Safety-critical embedded software is a different discipline from mine:
no garbage collector, no exceptions, no dynamic allocation, and a
certification process that decides what is acceptable. I started on my
own, in August 2026, so as not to apply for these positions without
knowing what they involve. Two Git repositories, one per language.
A course in modules, each pairing a language notion with the
certification objective that constrains it. On the process side:
high- and low-level requirements, traceability rebuilt by a script,
requirements-based tests, MC/DC coverage, coding standard,
configuration management.
It ends with a case study: a fuel quantity management system (FQMS),
DAL B, with its requirements documents and its traceability matrix.
Builds without a warning under MSVC, GCC and Clang; continuous
integration on Linux.
The same FQMS, against the same requirements, rewritten in Ada. The
point: measure what the Ada toolchain brings that C++ does not —
contracts, flow analysis, formal proof of absence of run-time errors
(DO-333), tool-supported MC/DC coverage, restrictions checked by the
compiler.
The toolchain is pinned in a container, which serves as the
controlled development environment.
These are training exercises, not certified projects, and I do not claim
the level of someone who has done this for fifteen years. They show what
I have understood of the standard and how I work. Both are public:
DO-178C-training
and DO-178C-training-ADA.
Ada/SPARK, C, C++, Rust: I have had my hands in all four, to varying
degrees. I will learn whichever the project uses.
I am also looking at formal training, or a VAE (French recognition of
prior learning), to give this move a recognised footing. That is a plan,
not yet under way.
Public projects
A Windows program that runs the commands you configure when a game
starts and when it stops. No list of games to maintain: it relies on a
Windows mechanism, and does not poll while you play. No administrator
rights, no network access unless asked.
Two self-contained executables, an MSI installer, on-demand updates,
170+ tests, continuous integration, and a design record that logs each
decision with the measurement behind it. First project in Rust; in
daily use on my machine.
Telemetry receiver for Forza Motorsport and Forza Horizon: decodes a
binary UDP protocol at 60 Hz, four frame variants depending on the
game, recording and playback. About fifty stars; the undocumented
fields come from community observations.
Rotation, compression and purge of IIS logs: auto-detection of the
installed services (WMI, IIS metabase), reporting to the Windows event
log, simulation mode. Born of a production need, where it ran for
years; maintained until 2023, forked by others.
On the side: github-release-downloader
(C#), and sandboxes in Go, Rust, Angular, Blazor and Vite.
I developed for twenty years without generative AI. On recent
repositories I use an AI assistant as a pair programmer — it appears as
co-author in the commit history — with caution: nothing is claimed
without having been run, and I remain responsible for everything
produced.
Skills
.NET / C# · ASP.NET Core · Angular / TypeScript · SQL Server · Azure ·
Kubernetes · Docker · GitHub Actions · Jenkins · SonarQube · IBM MQ ·
TDD · CI/CD
In progress: C++17, Ada 2022 / SPARK, Rust. Positions in detail on
LinkedIn.