Tristan Alderson

I’m looking for work that makes me forget to eat — the kind of work that stretches my abilities, forces me to reason from first principles, and rewards fast iteration and learning on the fly.

As avionics lead for QRET, the Queen’s Rocket Engineering Team, I’ve been designing flight electronics for a hybrid rocket, including CAN communication, power distribution, telemetry, and GPS recovery systems. Most of what I build runs on STM32s or ESP32s, usually bare-metal or with a lightweight RTOS.

I was diagnosed with ADHD in university, which means I sometimes have to be deliberate about how I manage complexity. I’ve turned that into a strength: it pushes me toward extremely fast, tight testing cycles. When I can prove something quickly and correctly, I can clear it from my mental RAM and move straight to the next problem.

I’m a hands-on engineer. I don’t want to be disconnected from the physical reality of the systems I build. If the hardware, firmware, or server I’m responsible for goes down, I want to be the one grabbing the multimeter, opening the logs, and debugging it myself.

Camaraderie matters a lot to me. I do my best work with driven, tight-knit teams where people care deeply, move quickly, and trust each other to solve hard problems together.