Michael Johnston
Dragon Flight Reliability Engineer at SpaceX
Pasadena, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolMichael Johnston is a spacecraft systems and avionics engineer with 14 years of hands-on experience across NASA JPL and SpaceX, currently focused on Starship avionics. He specializes in systems integration, verification & validation, and test automation for GN&C and avionics hardware, with deep experience executing system-level thermal vacuum and power cycling procedures on high-profile missions like Europa Clipper. At JPL he built Python-based test repositories and MBSE tooling that notably sped document workflows and automated mass-reporting tasks, and he brings that same process-optimization mindset to flight reliability work on Dragon and Starship. His background combines low-level electrical integrations and test equipment reconfigurations with software-driven test development, enabling fast, reliable fault injection and verification campaigns. An early web entrepreneur and active open-source contributor, he also contributes full-stack fixes and UI quality improvements to community projects. Based in Pasadena, he thrives on complex troubleshooting and takes ownership of end-to-end system performance for mission-critical platforms.
14 years of coding experience
5 years of employment as a software developer
California Polytechnic State University, San Luis ObispoAssociate’s Degree, Associate’s Degree at Cuesta CollegeGuilford High School
Github Skills (7)
css10
php10
federation9
self-hosting8
social-media8
mysql7
javascript4
Programming languages (1)
Github contributions (5)
friendica/friendica
Mar 2012 - Dec 2012
Friendica Communications Platform
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:11 commits in 9 months
Contributions summary:Michael primarily contributed to the Friendica communications platform by making front-end and back-end enhancements. They improved the user interface by adjusting CSS for better contrast and fixing display issues in the Darkzero theme. Additionally, they implemented new features by allowing users to set the number of items to display on the network page and by adding categories to posts. The user also addressed minor bugs and performed code cleanup by fixing typos.
social-networkfriendicafediversephpcommunications
unary/red
Feb 2015 - Apr 2015
Contributions:3 pushes, 3 branches in 1 month
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.