Greg Lucas
Principal Ground Software Engineer at Rocket Lab
Boulder, Colorado, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolGreg Lucas is a Principal Ground Software Engineer with 11 years of experience building real-time, cloud-native satellite and space-weather data systems, now leading ground software architecture and operations at Rocket Lab. He blends deep scientific training (PhD in aerospace engineering) with hands-on expertise in Python, AWS, and machine learning to turn research-grade algorithms into resilient, production-grade mission software. Greg has led teams to deliver mission science data centers and operational visualization tools used by forecasting centers, and has secured over $1M in NASA-funded work. An active open-source contributor to foundational scientific libraries like NumPy, Matplotlib, Cartopy and pyproj, he brings a rare combination of geospatial performance optimization and numerical-code fluency (including Fortran). Colocated in Boulder, he excels at cross-disciplinary collaboration between flight systems, mission ops, and research groups to ship reliable, scalable space systems.
11 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (BS) Nuclear Engineering, Bachelor of Science (BS) Nuclear Engineering at University of Wisconsin-MadisonDoctor of Philosophy (PhD) Aerospace Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Aerospace Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering at University of Colorado Boulder
Github Skills (23)
data-visualizations10
proj10
coordinate-transformation10
python10
data-science10
matplotlib10
cartopy10
data-visualisation10
geospatial10
spatial-data10
numpy10
geo10
performance-optimization10
cython10
spatial10
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
SciTools/cartopy
Jan 2018 - Dec 2022
Cartopy - a cartographic python library with matplotlib support
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:9 releases, 404 reviews, 296 commits in 5 years
Contributions summary:Greg's commits primarily focused on enhancing the shapefile reader within the cartopy library. They added the capability to use the Fiona library for shapefile reading, significantly improving performance. Further contributions included refactoring the shapefile reader code, addressing issues with geometry creation, and adding a new feature for visualizing the day/night terminator. These changes demonstrate expertise in geospatial data handling and library optimization.
python-librarycartopypythongeographyspatial
matplotlib/matplotlib
May 2019 - Jan 2023
matplotlib: plotting with Python
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:692 reviews, 197 commits, 280 PRs in 3 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Greg primarily contributed to bug fixes and improvements within the matplotlib library. Their work involved modifying the handling of invalid color map values (NaN, inf, -inf) to ensure proper mapping to the designated colors, as well as fixing problems with pcolormesh, colorbars, and several other elements within the rendering process. Furthermore, the user also addressed issues in various modules like axes and collections.
pythondata-sciencegtkdata-visualizationplotting
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