Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Embedded Software Engineer Intern · May – August 2025

I spent my summer working on embedded systems for the National Ignition Facility—the world’s largest laser system, which supports the US nuclear program.

What I worked on

Raspberry Pi evaluation for NIF control systems
Assessed whether the Pi could handle real-time control in the National Ignition Facility. It could, and went way above the team’s expectations.

Controller migration from Windows XP Embedded to Linux
Rewrote the Programmable Spatial Shaper controller in C++. The new version works as both an emulator and a functional embedded controller, maintaining hardware-accurate behavior in both modes. This is part of an effort to replace a controller that has been running on Windows XP Embedded since the 2000s.

CI/CD and testing infrastructure
Built GitLab pipelines with Docker and set up JUnit/GTest harnesses. Made the codebase more reliable and actually testable.

Bug hunting
Found and fixed a Java bug in the NIF camera controller that only showed up on ARM architecture. The bug had been there for over a decade, unnoticed, because the system previously ran on x86.

Recognition

Received ‘Honorable Mention’ at the lab’s summer Poster Symposium (roughly top 5 out of all interns).