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Nathaniel Mapaye inside an immersive balloon installation

Bay Area Systems & Embedded Software Engineer · C++23 · FreeRTOS · Go

Systems
to screens.

Bay Area systems and embedded software engineer building C++ concurrency libraries, FreeRTOS telemetry prototypes, application security tools, and iOS apps.

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SYSTEMS / SECURITY / PRODUCT

Operating range

Embedded systems
C++23, FreeRTOS, ESP32 and STM32 telemetry, DMA sampling, MQTT, and low-power design
Concurrency and cloud
Lock-free concurrency, atomics, Linux, Go, Kubernetes, Prometheus, and GitOps
Security and AI
Web application security testing, vulnerability triage and remediation, and grading AI model output

01 / Work

Selected work

Featured / 01

EmbNode

C++17 FreeRTOS telemetry prototype

Embedded telemetry firmware for ESP32 and STM32 boards, written in C++17 on FreeRTOS. Sampling, batching, and sending each run as their own task, and the packet format, OTA update logic, and power accounting are tested on a laptop before any hardware is involved.

Problem
A battery-powered sensor on an unreliable network has to keep sampling on schedule when sends fail, and an OTA update cannot leave the device in an unknown state.
System design
Sampler, aggregator, and communications tasks hand data off through FreeRTOS queues. Communications tries MQTT first and falls back to HTTP.
Evidence
Host tests feed in truncated frames, bad CRCs, and OTA backends that fail or commit after the deadline, with a fake clock so timing is repeatable.
Outcome
The packet and OTA logic pass those tests. DMA sampling, delivery retries, and battery measurements on a real board are still to do, and a full queue currently drops samples without counting them.
  • C++17
  • FreeRTOS
  • ESP32 / STM32
  • MQTT / HTTP
  • OTA / Watchdog
  • CMake / CTest
View EmbNode source ↗Read the telemetry design ↗
CRC16
Frame checksum
3
FreeRTOS tasks
MQTT, HTTP
Send path with fallback
02

SysLib

C++20 systems and concurrency library

A header-only C++20 library with two queues. The SPSC ring is lock-free and hands values from one producer to one consumer with acquire/release atomics. The MPMC queue is a deque behind a mutex and condition variable, so waiting consumers sleep instead of spinning.

  • Ring capacity rounds up to a power of two, so index wraparound is a bit mask
  • If moving a value out throws, the queue wakes the next consumer so the item is not stranded
  • Tests run four producers and four consumers and check that every value arrives exactly once
  • Optional ThreadSanitizer build
  • C++20
  • Atomics
  • Lock-free
  • TSan
View SysLib source ↗ Read the concurrency design ↗
03

GitOps

Go Kubernetes canary operator

A Kubernetes operator in Go that watches a canary release. It reads p95 latency from Prometheus, runs Gatekeeper policy checks, and rolls the canary back when latency regresses.

  • Rollback finished in under 30 seconds after a p95 regression, measured in a test cluster
  • Go
  • Kubernetes
  • Prometheus
  • ArgoCD
View GitOps source ↗
04

AURORA

Private React Native iOS caffeine and sleep tracker

An iPhone and iPad app for logging caffeine, checking daily intake, and running a 60-second reaction test for alertness. Sleep data comes in through optional read-only Apple Health access, and everything stays on the device.

Problem
I wanted to see how late-day caffeine affected my alertness without sending caffeine and sleep data to a server.
System design
React Native with a Swift bridge to HealthKit. Sleep samples are cleaned up (reversed intervals and duplicates dropped) before the rest of the app reads them.
Evidence
Tests cover Health access granted, denied, unavailable, and empty, plus malformed and duplicate sleep samples.
Outcome
The app works fully with Health access denied. I use the reaction test before long drives, and my friends use it to compete over who is most alert.
  • React Native
  • TypeScript
  • Swift
  • Apple HealthKit
  • AsyncStorage
  • SQLite
Read AURORA case study ↗ View AURORA demo ↗

02 / Experience

Systems.
Security.
Product.

  1. 01

    LLM Specialist

    Frontier AI Lab

    Jun 2026 – Aug 2026

    San Francisco, CA / Contract

    • Graded frontier model responses to software engineering and technical reasoning prompts for correctness, instruction following, and edge cases.
    • Wrote annotations for recurring failure patterns, with the steps needed to reproduce each one.

    AI Evaluation / Software Analysis / Python / C++ / Structured Rubrics

  2. 02

    Cyber Security AI Red-Teamer Intern

    CFX Indonesia

    Jun 2026 – Present

    Jakarta, Indonesia

    • Assessed 30+ web, network, and control assets for risk analysis, control documentation, and vulnerability remediation.
    • Triaged 27+ vulnerabilities in OJK-regulated digital-asset infrastructure and followed each one until it was fixed.

    Burp Suite / OWASP ASVS / Risk Analysis / Vulnerability Triage / Control Documentation

  3. 03

    Subject Matter Expert (SME), AI Alignment

    Handshake

    Apr 2026 – Present

    Remote / Contract

    • Audited 8+ repository-level software tasks, checking code, diffs, and tests against what each task required.
    • Wrote up where implementations fell short, scored against structured rubrics for AI-alignment review.

    Git / GitHub / Python / C++ / AI Evaluation Rubrics

  4. 04

    Linear Algebra Tutor

    UCSC ACE

    Jan 2026 – Apr 2026

    Santa Cruz, CA / Hybrid

    • Tutored linear algebra: systems of equations, matrix operations, vector spaces, linear transformations, eigenvalues, and diagonalization.
    • Ran exam review and practice sessions, working through problems step by step so students could reason through them instead of memorizing procedures.

    MATLAB / LaTeX / Python

  5. 05

    Data Center Engineering Intern

    Bitera D.C

    Aug 2025 – Sep 2025

    Jakarta, Indonesia

    • Verified 16+ high-severity web findings with authenticated testing, then retested them after fixes.
    • Supported five live data-center domains (Linux, networking, power, cooling, and alarms) and wrote SOPs for routine checks.

    Burp Suite / Linux / Git / LibreNMS / Markdown SOPs

  6. 06

    Cyber Security Analyst Intern

    Xapiens Teknologi Indonesia

    Jul 2024 – Sep 2024

    Tangerang, Indonesia

    • Ran authenticated scans and manual tests on 50+ web endpoints, confirmed which findings were exploitable, and wrote proof-of-concept reports for several CVSS 8.0+ issues.
    • Ranked findings for clients to fix first and retested them after each fix.

    Nessus / Burp Suite / OWASP Testing Guide / TCP/IP / Jira

Nathaniel Mapaye posing in front of an aquarium

03 / Notes

Notes from
the underground

Browse all engineering notes

04 / Contact

Let’s build.

Open to Bay Area and remote internships and early-career roles in systems, embedded software, application security, and product engineering.

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