Dustin Gardner

Blue Origin, Denver, CO

• Reduced annualized AWS spend from $6.5M to under $1.5M through sustained architectural optimization across distributed compute orchestration, containers, CI/CD, and CPU-level tuning including affinity pinning and per-node resource optimization.
• Delivered 1.5 billion seconds of simulated flight time across certification-scale Monte Carlo campaigns of 30,000+ runs, representing 50,000× throughput growth from early development baselines.
• Built distributed orchestration integrating MATLAB/Simulink autocoded flight software with large-scale AWS compute, enabling tens of thousands of parallel simulation runs per campaign.
• Designed map-reduce data pipelines and tree-structured merge strategies for efficient large-dataset processing, eliminating quadratic merge costs and enabling linear scaling.
• Engineered production reliability at certification scale, diagnosing spot interruptions, scale-dependent race conditions, and silent container failures across tens of thousands of parallel jobs.
• Built cost observability frameworks (Datadog, Prometheus) enabling per-campaign spend tracking; authored proposal to establish a dedicated HPC & Simulation Platform team to scale infrastructure across multiple spacecraft programs.
• Serve as technical bridge between GNC engineers and infrastructure, translating flight dynamics requirements into distributed compute architecture and communicating system status to non-technical leadership.
• Mentor 2 GNC engineers regularly on CS fundamentals, HPC patterns, and cloud infrastructure, with 3–5 additional informal mentees.

Lockheed Martin Space, Denver, CO

• Managed CI/CD and simulation infrastructure for 100+ engineers across 80+ servers, sustaining 40,000 jobs/week at 99.5% uptime. Promoted through three levels to DevSecOps Tech Lead.
• Migrated 100+ legacy simulation and testbed workflows to cloud-native CI/CD in AWS with autoscaling compute.
• Expanded Digital Twin initiative from concept to production as scrum master; delivered customer demonstrations to the Air Force.

Lockheed Martin Space, Huntsville & Denver

Tennessee Tech, Cookeville, TN