Zouhair Mahboubi
Modeling And Simulation Lead
Palo Alto, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolZouhair Mahboubi is a Modeling and Simulation Lead with 11 years of experience building and shipping simulation, control, and autonomy solutions for electric VTOLs, unmanned systems, and air traffic management from Palo Alto. He combines technical leadership—managing a 10+ person cross-functional team at Joby Aviation—with hands-on expertise in flight dynamics, control theory, reinforcement learning, and DevOps for CI/CD pipelines. A PhD-trained aerospace engineer with top grades from Stanford and McGill, he has founded a consultancy (7 Knots) advising autonomy and robotics teams on physics-based modeling, optimization, and production deployment. Zouhair is also an active open-source contributor, having improved core mechanics in SymPy and added map-based visualization features to Plotly.js, reflecting a comfort across back-end and front-end tooling. He’s bilingual (English/French), brings experience negotiating aviation regulations and setting product strategy, and is known for turning complex nonlinear dynamics problems into robust, testable simulation stacks.
11 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
Foundations of General Management, Business Administration and Management, General, Foundations of General Management, Business Administration and Management, General at Harrison MetalBEng, Mechanical Engineering (Computer Science Minor), 3.99, BEng, Mechanical Engineering (Computer Science Minor), 3.99 at McGill UniversityConstructive Collaboration, Constructive Collaboration at Kellogg Executive EducationB.Eng (Exchange Year), Mechanical Engineering, B.Eng (Exchange Year), Mechanical Engineering at Technische Universität MünchenDoctor of Philosophy (PhD), Aeronautics and Astronautics, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford University
English, French, German, Arabic
Github Skills (19)
webgl10
data-visualizations10
computer-algebra10
javascript10
python10
sympy10
charts10
mathematics10
data-visualisation10
math10
chartjs10
charting10
computer-algebra-system10
mechanics10
data-visualization10
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
sympy/sympy
Jan 2022 - Sep 2022
A computer algebra system written in pure Python
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:15 reviews, 10 commits, 6 PRs in 8 months
Contributions summary:Zouhair primarily contributed to the `sympy/sympy` repository by modifying and improving the mechanics module. Their work involved implementing and refining core functionalities within the Kane's method, including the explicit and implicit forms for kinematic matrices and the full equations of motion. The contributions addressed issues related to kinematic equations and unit quaternion representation, enhancing the performance and flexibility of the symbolic mechanics capabilities. The user also made updates to tests related to codegen.
mathpythonsciencecomputer-algebra-systemalgebra
plotly/plotly.js
Feb 2020 - Apr 2020
Open-source JavaScript charting library behind Plotly and Dash
Role in this project:Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:10 commits, 1 PR, 20 comments in 2 months
Contributions summary:Zouhair primarily focused on enhancing the `scattermapbox` trace within the Plotly.js charting library. Their contributions involved adding support for marker rotation and overlap, as well as implementing corresponding unit tests. These changes included modifications to the `convert.js`, `attributes.js`, and `defaults.js` files. Furthermore, the user addressed code style issues and made related improvements.
chartsdashcharting-librarychartwebgl
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