Summary
Sahil Kale is a controls software engineer with eight years of hands-on experience designing and shipping real-time control systems for aerospace, automotive, and robotic platforms. Currently working on Starship controls at SpaceX, he previously shipped safety-critical ASIL-D steer-by-wire and thermal powertrain controllers at Tesla and developed embedded motor and sensor firmware across Optimus and vehicle projects. His strengths span model-based control, state estimation, fault detection, and embedded C/C++ firmware, with a track record of improving system robustness through modelling, telemetry-driven diagnosis, and hardware-in-the-loop testing. He has led large student engineering teams to build flight-ready UAV systems and created production-grade logging, recovery, and fault-tolerant protocols in commercial products. Not obvious from titles: he combines low-level PCB and firmware design with high-level control strategy, e.g., architecting power distribution firmware and custom digitizer boards alongside control algorithms. Based in San Francisco, he brings practical multidisciplinary engineering judgment to complex, safety-critical systems.
7 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
MSc Robotics and Control Systems, MSc Robotics and Control Systems at TU Delft | Mechanical Engineering
High School Diploma, High School Diploma at Dr. EP Scarlett High School
Bachelor of Applied Science in Engineering - BASc (Eng) Mechatronics Engineering, Bachelor of Applied Science in Engineering - BASc (Eng) Mechatronics Engineering at University of Waterloo