Vince Woo

Flight Software Engineer

About Me

Flight Software Engineer at NASA JPL with 20 years of experience across mission-critical space systems, enterprise software, and engineering leadership. Currently supporting Europa Clipper operations after leading the FSW Integration Test team through launch.

Experience

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Europa Clipper Flight Operations - AVS/FSW

December 2023 - Present

https://jpl.nasa.gov
  • Developed flight procedures, contingency plans, and operational tools to support Europa Clipper launch and early cruise operations.
  • Served as Avionics and FSW console operator, monitoring subsystem health in real time during critical mission events including launch and spacecraft checkout.
  • Represented the FSW team in the post-launch software update campaign, performed nominal and off-nominal testing of the update process and safing recovery procedures.
  • Developed automated ground tools for spacecraft telemetry trending and analysis, enabling faster anomaly detection and reducing manual data review effort.

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Europa Clipper FSW/FIT Lead

June 2023 - March 2026

https://jpl.nasa.gov
  • Led a team of 10 engineers in verifying and validating L5 requirements and flight software dictionary items for the Europa Clipper mission.
  • Oversaw maintenance of the FSW build infrastructure, ensuring reliable and repeatable software delivery across the team.
  • Drove closure of all outstanding testing gaps ahead of Europa Clipper’s launch, coordinating across engineering teams to meet mission-critical milestones.
  • Served as team liaison to Software Quality Assurance and NASA IVV (Independent Verification and Validation), facilitating audits, reviews, and cross-team coordination to ensure compliance with mission software standards.

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

F' Infrastructure FSW Engineer

March 2025 - October 2025

https://jpl.nasa.gov
  • Triaged and resolved bug reports and feature requests for the F’ framework, contributing fixes back to the open-source framework.
  • Executed a major refactoring of the F’ serialization layer to enforce consistent directionality between buffers and serializable objects, improving framework clarity and maintainability.
  • Piloted agentic coding tools (Windsurf, Cursor) for debugging, documentation, and implementation tasks, evaluating their effectiveness for adoption in flight software development workflows.

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Europa Clipper FSW/FIT Engineer

May 2019 - June 2023

https://jpl.nasa.gov
  • Designed, implemented, and maintained Python integration tests verifying L5 requirements against spacecraft simulation environments (software and hardware).
  • Partnered with module developers to design tests for Critical Relay Controllers, Event Reporting, Communication Behaviors, Radio manager, and FSW load and patch modules.
  • Developed and maintained tools for managing the tracking of verification items and their status for use in release reporting.
  • Served as team liaison for Known Warning EVR Dispositions, coordinating with cross-functional V&V teams to triage and disposition anomalous event reports.

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Enterprise Software Application Developer IV, Group 172B

January 2017 - May 2019

https://jpl.nasa.gov
  • Led a team of 3 developers in improving and building upon the Document Risk Resource Tool (DRRT). Designed a scalable text extraction pipeline with SQS and S3, implemented in Java and Python. Redesigned and refactored the DRRT web application in Python Flask and Angular.
  • Built the Strategic Partners Applications (SPA) from the ground up in a team of 4 developers. The application is built on Flask in Python with a Polymer front-end. The dynamic user interface includes custom D3 components to provide user-friendly features for reporting and forecasting.
  • Refactored the Facilities Search front-end JavaScript to reduce latency and improve user experience. Investigated and fixed several critical bugs in preparation for production deployment.

Amazon.com, Inc.

Software Development Manager, Search Data Aggregation

January 2014 - January 2017

https://amazon.com
  • Managed a team of 7 SDEs developing the platform to pre-compute Amazon’s immense retail catalog search index containing billions of items.
  • Worked with principal engineers and partner teams to evolve an elastically scalable system to sustain consistent year-over-year traffic growth.
  • Provided search platform expertise to high-profile product teams including Amazon Instant Video, PrimeNow, and AmazonFresh.
  • Actively engaged on various recruiting tasks such as resume screening, phone screens and leading on-site interview loops.

Amazon.com, Inc.

Software Development Engineer II, Search Data Aggregation

May 2010 - January 2014

https://amazon.com
  • As part of the Search Data Aggregation team I designed and developed highly scalable and efficient applications that process, aggregate and publish hundreds of millions of updates a day to the Amazon search index.
  • Designed and implemented features in a distributed NoSQL processing framework in Java.
  • Managed search feature requests for the team. Responsibilities included requirements gathering, providing support to stakeholders, and scheduling and prioritizing feature work.

Education

University of Waterloo

Bachelors of Computer Science, Honours Computer Science

September 2002 - June 2007