Donald Jennings

Lead the design and implementation of mission-critical radar processing software, ensuring high reliability and performance in safety-critical environments. Accountable for software architecture and design quality, working closely with the system architect to evolve and improve the overall software design. Act as a technical mentor to graduate apprentices, supporting their development in core computer science concepts and guiding their progress through university and professional goal setting. Deliver customer-facing demonstrations of operational systems, clearly communicating technical capabilities and system behaviour to stakeholders. Experienced across the full software development lifecycle, including requirements analysis, architecture, implementation, testing, and release. Undertaking a part-time Engineering Doctorate (EngD) focused on high-performance computing and heterogeneous runtime design for signal processing workloads.

I contributed to the development of software solutions for defence systems, focusing on modern C++ and adhering to DO-178C compliance standards. I participated in design discussions, code reviews, and collaborated with cross-functional teams to deliver high-quality software products. I held responsibility as scrum master for my team, ensuring effective collaboration and timely delivery of project milestones. I also held responsibility as Product Designer (Junior Architect) for my team, working closely with Solutions Architects to ensure alignment between design and technical implementation.

Hired as first undergraduate software engineer in the company. Worked alongside the Solution team to develop safety-critical software solutions while balancing a final year of undergraduate studies.

Completed a summer internship where I led the development of an internal software tool for mechanical engineers. I cleared a backlog of features for the tool and initiated an internal release process.

I led development of platform features for an education technology startup across a React frontend, Java backend, and AWS serverless workloads.

As Project Lead of the Software Quality Assurance team for HYPED (University of Edinburgh’s award-winning Hyperloop competition entry), I was responsible for managing weekly operations, technical direction, and strategic alignment of the QA function within a multi-disciplinary engineering team. I led the design and implementation of automated test suites, set up CI/CD pipelines, and developed scalable testing infrastructure across the codebase to ensure robustness, performance, and reliability of mission-critical systems. I authored the team’s software testing strategy and specification documents for international hyperloop competitions, and ensured the QA effort remained aligned with project roadmaps, competition deadlines, and engineering priorities.