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Sean’s engineering career started on spacecraft. At NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory he was lead systems engineer for the Earth Entry Vehicle on the Mars Sample Return campaign, the capsule built to carry Martian samples back through Earth’s atmosphere, coordinating across the international teams behind the orbiter and the vehicle. Before that he worked flight dynamics for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter at NASA Goddard, where he determined the mission’s official launch window, and did R&D systems engineering at Sandia National Laboratories. He holds a Voyager Award from NASA’s Mars Exploration Directorate and published on reentry vehicle design in the Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets.

He then co-founded Sorting Robotics, a Y Combinator-backed robotics company, and spent three years as its COO running operations, finance, legal, and hiring. Three US patents in robotics and automation came out of that work.

Today Sean leads the technical side of Gaoji Ventures. He is a senior software engineer at Samsara on the internal platform team, working on identity and access. Before that he spent three years at Snackpass building payments infrastructure: self-serve store onboarding, KYC flows, fee settings, and a SaaS subscription system, across a TypeScript and React frontend with a Node and Python backend.