Nick Brake
Engineering Lead at Empirical Systems Aerospace, Inc. (ESAero)
California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolNick Brake is an Engineering Lead and aeronautical engineer with 10+ years designing, simulating, and flight-testing UAVs and gimbal-stabilized payloads across startups and defense contractors. He combines a systems-engineering mindset with hands-on expertise in flight dynamics, 6DoF simulation, stability and controls, and rapid UAV design to move concepts to production under demanding schedules. As principal investigator on multiple SBIRs and a former flight sciences lead at Zipline, he blends analytical rigor with empirical flight-test validation to deliver mission-optimized aircraft and payload solutions. He also contributes to prominent open-source aerospace tooling such as OpenVSP’s VSPAERO, improving aerodynamic solver robustness—evidence of a practical coder who tightens both algorithms and real-world systems. Based in California, he mentors cross-functional teams to solve high-stakes aerospace problems with measurable performance gains.
10 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
BS, Aeronautical Engineering, BS, Aeronautical Engineering at University of California, DavisM.S., Aeronautical Engineering, M.S., Aeronautical Engineering at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo
Github Skills (7)
debug10
c-language10
cprogramming-language10
aerodynamics10
aircraft8
hardware-designs8
system-design8
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
OpenVSP/OpenVSP
May 2016 - Sep 2018
A parametric aircraft geometry tool
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:170 commits, 1 comment, 9 issues in 2 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Nick primarily contributed to bug fixes and code improvements within the VSPAERO project. Their work involved correcting uninitialized variables, such as in the VSP_Aero module, and addressing other coding issues related to aerodynamic solvers. They also performed code cleanup tasks, including whitespace and indentation corrections.
aircraftparametricc-plus-pluspanda3dgeometry
nbrakeES/OpenVSP
Sep 2016 - Feb 2019
Contributions:1 push, 1 branch in 2 years 5 months
parametricaircraftgeometry
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