Aerospace engineer who builds ventures as well as systems, working across GNC, systems engineering, and data-driven problem solving. Project experience spans spacecraft mission design, EKF-based navigation, and aerodynamic analysis; industry experience at Saudia Technic and Aramco covers continuing airworthiness and MRO operations on narrow-body and wide-body fleets. Founded and ran Waypoint AI, a self-funded LLM routing venture sold to independent clients, and is now studying technology innovation and entrepreneurship at KAUST TIE.

• Founder

  Startup

  Waypoint AI · Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

  May 2025 – Mar 2026

  • Founded and bootstrapped an independent venture around an LLM routing layer, run solo alongside freelance engineering work from first prototype through to wind-down.
  • Designed and shipped the router: a lightweight classifier scored each prompt for reasoning depth, latency budget and tool use, then dispatched it to the cheapest model in the pool that cleared the bar, escalating automatically on low-confidence responses.
  • Cut blended inference spend by ~60% against an all-frontier-model baseline while holding answer quality within 2% on a 1,200-prompt internal eval set.
  • Built the platform in Python and TypeScript — streaming proxy, semantic response cache, per-tenant usage metering and provider failover across four model vendors.
  • Sold and onboarded three paying clients off freelance networks, turning their traffic patterns into the routing policies that shipped.
• Aircraft Engineer

  Internship

  Saudia Technic · Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

  May 2025 – Sep 2025

  • Resolved 50+ maintenance queries in AMOS against CMM/AMM/SRM technical manuals, achieving a 95% first-pass engineering order approval rate.
  • Supported line and hangar operations on A320/321, B787-9/10 and B777-300 fleets across 10+ scheduled weekly checks.
  • Verified post-maintenance airworthiness for 7 aircraft against GACAR, FAA and EASA requirements, maintaining weight and balance compliance prior to release.
• Research Assistant

  Penn State University · University Park, PA

  Jan 2024 – May 2025

  • Research across autonomous vehicles, GNC system design and aerodynamic modeling.
• Aircraft Engineer

  Internship

  Aramco · Dhahran, Eastern Province, Saudi Arabia

  May 2024 – Sep 2024

  • Aircraft engineering internship with Aloula MRO, covering maintenance, repair and overhaul operations.
• Teaching Assistant

  Part-time

  Penn State University · State College, PA

  Aug 2023 – Apr 2024

  • Teaching assistant for MATH 141 (Calculus II).

• Prometheus Mission I

  — Autonomous Satellite Refueling MissionSystems Engineering

  Aug 2025 – Dec 2025

  • Led a 6-engineer team designing a 70 kg autonomous refueling payload for LEO satellites, delivering ±2 mm position and ±1° attitude accuracy at docking contact through EKF-based relative navigation.
• Autonomous Drone

  — Landing on Moving ObjectGNC

  Jan 2025 – May 2025

  • Built a cascaded PID/PD quadrotor guidance system for autonomous landing on a moving vehicle; achieved centimeter-level touchdown via velocity feedforward and flight-phase logic.
• Extended Kalman Filter

  — Lunar Navigation SystemGNC

  Jan 2025 – May 2025

  • Developed a 9-state EKF in MATLAB running at 100 Hz for lunar navigation with multi-rate IMU fusion; validated within 2σ consistency bounds.
• Turbine Blade CFD

  — Aerodynamic Design & AnalysisAerodynamics

  Aug 2024 – Dec 2024

  • Modeled a parametric 3D blade in SolidWorks; reduced total-pressure loss by 12% and raised section L/D by 18% through CFD optimization.

Full technical documentation at salehaldhafeeri.com

• Board Member

  Nittany Lion Consulting Group · University Park, PA

  Jan 2024 – May 2025

  • Delivered 6+ client engagements; reduced average case turnaround by 20% through standardized hypothesis-driven analysis frameworks.
• Treasurer

  Penn State MENA Caucus Club

  Dec 2023 – Dec 2024

  • Built and launched a secure finance website for 100+ members using JavaScript, Python and PostgreSQL; managed a $10K event budget across 7 fundraisers.