Founders
Dr. Iona Caverswell
PhD in image-reconstruction inverse problems (Cambridge, 2018). Postdoc on AIA pipeline calibration at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory. Two years at a lucky-imaging group at Cambridge before co-founding the desk. Author of the photon-count Poisson likelihood layer that underpins the Photon mission.
Reads residuals before metrics. Will defend a calibration plot for an hour.
Dr. Hari Senapathy
PhD in active-region magnetohydrodynamics (Imperial, 2017). Postdoc at the Indian Institute of Astrophysics on flare precursor signatures. Three years on the ESA Solar Orbiter SPICE team before co-founding Solstice Pro AI. Owns the Helios mission methodology end-to-end.
Sceptical of TSS until shown calibration. Will redraw your confusion matrix from scratch.
Staff engineers
Maeve Renholm
MSc in computational astrophysics (Edinburgh, 2020). Four years on the ZTF alert broker at a UK partner site before joining the desk. Built the real-bogus classifier currently powering the Sky mission; owns the cosmic-ray segmentation work that is replacing LACosmic in three partner pipelines.
Treats production latency as a physical constant. Allergic to plot defaults.
Tomasz Bréan
MEng in compiler infrastructure (EPFL, 2019). Three years building deterministic CUDA build pipelines at a particle-physics computing centre. Owns the reproducibility commitments behind every Solstice release: pinned NVIDIA container revisions, byte-identical rebuilds, and a runbook that scientists can read at three in the morning.
Will explain why your numerical result moved with a kernel update.
Founding advisors
Dr. Anabela Cardoso
Twenty years on the ESA Space Weather Service Network. Currently independent. Advises on the Helios mission's operational integration; reviews the failure-mode catalogue quarterly and pushes back on metrics that an operations desk cannot actually act on.
Prof. Léonard Vrij
Detector physicist; formerly on the Vera Rubin Observatory commissioning team. Advises on the Sky mission's evolution into the LSST era and on EMCCD calibration questions that arise on the Photon mission. Reads every dispatch before it is filed; has killed two.
The roster grows quietly
We do not run an open careers page. The desk grows by referral from observatory partners, conference colleagues, and former students of the people on the masthead. We have hired exactly one person per year for the last two years; we expect to hire one more in 2026 and possibly nobody in 2027. The size of the engineering desk is the part of the product we are most disciplined about.
If you have a colleague who would be a fit and you are willing to introduce them, please write directly via the contact page. We will reply within a working week to every referral, whether or not there is an opening.
If you want to read what the team has written
The Dispatches page collects the long-form technical writing from the desk; each piece carries the engineering author byline. The team responds to careful messages about specific dispatches faster than to anything else.
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