Hayden A Burgoyne
Work and Research Experience
Sophia Space
October 2025–Present. Pasadena, CA
Product Systems Engineer
- Early system architecture design for space-based edge compute and orbital data centers. Defining roadmap for technology development, commercial partnerships, and government engagement with co-founders.
- Technical interface to growing commercial and government partnerships.
- Engineering leadership of initial demonstration missions of Sophia Space TILEs and Orbital Data Centers.
June 2025–October 2025 (Sabbatical from TransAstra). Los Angeles, CA
Founder
- Participated in 50 Years VC’s 5050 Founders Program and Menlo Ventures’ Menlo Labs Fellowship, gaining experience in fundraising, GTM definition, and startup execution.
- Built multiple AI-driven MVPs for personalized political engagement and better constituent representation using LLMs, RAG pipelines, and statistical modeling (“Perplexity for Polling”). Conducted customer discovery interviews with local officials, campaigns, and policy groups. Designed and implemented full web platforms, as well as LLM fine-tuning and synthetic polling data pipelines.
TransAstra
March 2022 to October 2025. Pacoima, CA
TransAstra is a seed-stage YC company (S21) developing the technologies to find and capture asteroids, then extract their resources to build in-space infrastructure.
Director of Engineering
- Engineering manager for all of TransAstra's projects including:
- Wrote winning technical proposals for Small Business Innovative Research Grants from NASA and the Space Force totaling approximately $8.4M of non-dilutive funding. (Phase 2s: link, link, link, link, link, TACFI: link)