Ben Kastner

I'm a Lead Software Engineer at SHOTOVER Systems, where I build the ETL infrastructure that produces map data for airborne mission management systems used by international aviation and law enforcement clients - the data ships on physical hard drives and is loaded directly into the aircraft hardware. The core of that work is an object-oriented Python framework I built out of small, modular pieces, so we can quickly create a reliable custom ETL script for any customer's dataset instead of rewriting one from scratch each time they need an update. I've also taken ownership of bigger problems when they come up - I ran a build-vs-buy analysis across four internal approaches and five external vendors to replace an unreliable core dataset, and the resulting acquisition took our data accuracy from 76% to 98%. Outside of work I built fallingspacejunk.com, a serverless AWS app that tracks satellite orbital data and predicts atmospheric re-entries.