Senior Firmware Engineer
Joshua Sackos earned his B.S. in Computer Engineering from Washington State University (WSU) in 2013, and his M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Portland State University (PSU) in 2016. His academic focus has been on Embedded Systems and their applications for solving real-world problems.
He was first introduced to computer programming in 1994 when he began programming in the C language at the age of thirteen, after seeing the topic discussed in Hollywood movies. He quickly developed a passion for computers which led to his first internship in 1996 at Summit Projects, an e-commerce company. At Summit Projects Joshua learned HTML, Photoshop, Fireworks, and CSS. Joshua left Summit Projects in 1998.
In 1999 he began a new e-commerce position at WebNW where he learned/applied ASP and SQL, to create dynamic database driven websites with fully functional back-end interfaces. The backend interfaces allowed clients to completely manage the appearance of their websites, add/remove products, process orders, and more. Joshua left WebNW in 2001. From 2001-2007 Joshua ran his own e-commerce consulting company.
During his time at WSU (2010-2013) Joshua developed a passion for creating hardware/software solutions for real-world problems, including but not limited to agriculture, aerospace, communications, and robotics. He obtained an internship with the WSU Mathematics Department to design HW/SW solutions to generate randomized lighting effects (data) for an image analysis team.
In 2012 Joshua became a Microprocessor Systems teaching assistant at WSU, and began an FPGA internship at Digilent Inc. where he wrote VHDL and Verilog demos for Digilent’s product line. After completing his B.S. in Computer Engineering he participated in a summer internship focused on High Performance Computing (HPC) at the New Mexico Consortium in Los Alamos, NM. In his HPC internship he learned about Linux system administration including topics such as LDAP, DNS, DHCP, NTP, Apache, NFS, IPTABLES, PXE Booting, and Erasure Coding Cloud Storage technologies.
Joshua’s time in Los Alamos lead to a Post-Baccalaureate position in Intelligence and Space Research Division 3 (ISR-3) at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), which he started in 2013. During his first year at Los Alamos he developed a Single-Event-Upset (SEU) mitigation system for FPGA’s operating in the space environment. His work consisted of developing VHDL logic circuits, writing C/C++ firmware that ran inside of an RTOS, PCB design, and developing Python GUI’s for data acquisition and analysis.
Over the course of six years at LANL Joshua worked on mission critical applications ranging from helping small farmers preserve their crops against frost damage, to making significant contributions to the SHERLOC and SuperCam Mars 2020 Perseverance rover instruments. After completing his work on the SHERLOC and SuperCam instruments in 2019 Joshua left LANL to relocate to the Pacific Northwest to be closer to his family.
In 2019 Joshua decided to participate in a summer research opportunity as a contractor with a Financial Technology (FINTECH) company. The successful research led to an extended full-time contract with the client, where he created a Python-based software platform that enabled the rapid development of new innovative FINTECH tools. He integrated the Python platform with pre-existing C# libraries and dynamically exposed the tool suite(s) to the cloud. After completing his contract in 2021 Joshua taught himself about operating heavy machinery, excavating bare land, installing AC power service, septic systems, etc., to transform a plot of bare land into a home for he and his family.