About Joe Poznanski
Engineering judgment for systems that have to hold up.
I am a principal software engineer with 15+ years building mission-critical aerospace and high-fidelity simulation software. I turn ambiguous operational problems into reliable, test-backed systems across Rust, C++, Python, distributed infrastructure, and operator-facing tools.
Now
Current focus
Reliability research for automated systems
Testing automation with explicit stop conditions, verification evidence, and failure paths that remain understandable to an operator.
Multi-agent CLI workflows
Designing parallel agent patterns with clear ownership, collision avoidance, and evidence-based completion checks across Claude Code CLI and Codex CLI.
Compute-critical Rust
Using Rust for API services, CLI tooling, and integration boundaries where explicit types and predictable failure behavior matter.
How I work
Operating principles
Make the failure legible
I separate reachability, state, ownership, and verification before changing a shared system. A useful recovery leaves the next operator with a clear diagnosis, not just a green light.
Put evidence beside the claim
Tests, artifacts, constraints, and known limits belong next to the decision they support. That keeps technical judgment reviewable and prevents confidence from outrunning proof.
Choose explicit boundaries
I favor typed interfaces, static-first delivery, and stop conditions that fail loudly. The goal is software whose behavior remains understandable when a dependency or assumption breaks.
Career
Experience
Otto Aerospace
Principal Software Engineer, SuperNatural Vision Program
2025-present
Blue Origin
Senior Simulation / Aerospace Operations Software Engineer
2022-2025
Avenger Flight Group
Director of Simulation & Software Engineering
2014-2022
SIMCOM Training
Flight Simulation Supervisor & Project Manager
2011-2014
Uses
Selected tools
- Rust
- First choice for anything compute-critical, latency-sensitive, or where I want type-system guarantees at integration boundaries. The WASM pricer and API service are both Rust.
- Python
- Data pipelines, strategy code, and scripting where the ecosystem (numpy, pandas, scipy) is the right fit. pyright keeps the type boundaries honest.
- GitHub Actions
- CI/CD for the monorepo. The pipeline runs Vitest, TypeScript checks, Playwright, and cargo test before any merge.
- ripgrep (rg)
- Fast repository-scale text search with .gitignore-aware defaults and predictable command-line output.
Learning
Current reading
Crafting Interpreters
Robert Nystrom
Working through the tree-walking interpreter half. The gap between 'I understand parsing in principle' and 'I can implement a correct recursive descent parser from scratch' is larger than expected and worth closing.
Asynchronous Programming in Rust
Carl Fredrik Samson
The executor and waker internals finally make the async/await desugaring feel concrete rather than magical. Relevant to every Axum handler I write.