Charles Hampton — Software Engineer

What I do

Low-level systems to full-stack AI.

My work spans embedded real-time systems — cross-compiling RTEMS for NXP PowerPC hardware, debugging dynamic loaders at the assembly level, and bringing up network-boot infrastructure — and full-stack application engineering, where I build AI-powered web and desktop tools end to end.

I also bring a federal compliance background — NIST SP 800-171 and CMMC control mapping, evidence collection, and System Security Plan authoring — so engineering work doesn't stall behind documentation gaps. Systems engineering that knows how to live inside structured, audited environments is what I bring.

Experience

Where I've worked

Convergent Data LLC Current

December 2025 – present

Software Engineer

Alexandria, VA

Engineered and maintain a 60-patch GitLab CI/CD pipeline that cross-compiles RTEMS for the NXP T4240 (PowerPC e6500), produces bootable ITB images, and archives build artifacts to a Nexus repository.
Debugged the RTEMS RTL dynamic module system at the assembly level — resolved PowerPC64 REL24 relocations and TOC pointer setup, enabling dynamically loadable .o modules over NFS.
Diagnosed a DPAA2 Ethernet driver stall where ARP/ICMP frames entered the hardware QMan DQRR queue but never surfaced to the network stack; traced it to a Frame Queue stuck in Active Held state.
Designed NXP hypervisor configurations running Linux and RTEMS guest partitions concurrently on the same T4240, supporting a dual-RTEMS shared-image pipeline.
Built a T4240 fleet-management web app (Python/Flask + JavaScript) with AUTO_IP board detection, real-time serial WebSocket, multicast config delivery to 7 guest partitions, and an NFS-based app install system.

Taurus Telesys

2024 – 2025

Software & Compliance Engineer

Newport News, VA

Developed a Digital Twin+ distributed-energy simulation in EPICS: a containerized solar testbed (PV panels, inverters, thermal tanks) instrumented via Prometheus and Grafana, deployed on RHEL 8 with Podman under STIG compliance.
Set up TFTP/NFS boot infrastructure (RHEL 8.8, FIPS-enabled) serving T4240RDB SDK images for a 500-node production deployment at Newport News Shipbuilding; managed DTB modifications and FMC policy files.
Administered two VPN-segmented Proxmox environments; performed vzdump backups, qmrestore migrations, and FIPS-compliant SSH key provisioning.
Supported NIST SP 800-171 and CMMC Level 2: mapped controls to evidence, authored SSP sections, and prepared assessment artifacts across access control, audit logging, configuration management, and incident response.

Analytica

2022 · 5 months

CI/CD Intern

Built and maintained CI/CD pipelines for development teams; streamlined build and release workflows.

Projects

Things I've built

Federal Opportunity Intelligence Platform

Full-stack contract-intelligence app: SAM.gov integration with keyword matching across 47 phrases and 7 capability groups, a bid/no-bid pipeline UI and win-rate dashboard, semantic résumé matching, and a RAG search layer over all contract posts.

PythonFlaskPostgreSQLSAM.gov APILanceDB

CMMC Compliance SaaS Platform

Multi-tenant CMMC/NIST compliance SaaS: JWT/RBAC auth, 1,456 seeded controls translated to plain-English IT requirements, an Incident-Response "Panic Button" with a 72-hour DoD notification countdown, and an AI layer on Proxmox with GPU passthrough (LanceDB + Ollama, sub-second inference).

PythonReactPostgreSQLOllamaProxmox

Terminus — Terminal Code Editor

A terminal code editor in Rust: rope-based O(log n) editing, incremental tree-sitter highlighting across 10+ languages, multi-cursor, split panes, fuzzy finder, and a live AI chat panel wired to Claude/Codex/Gemini CLIs.

Rustratatuitree-sitterropey

Detroit — Multi-Agent Code Factory

Native Rust desktop app (GPUI) with an assembly-line UI: six reorderable stations (INTAKE→RESEARCH→PLAN→BUILD→REVIEW→SHIP), each driven by a specific AI agent, with real-time JSONL stream parsing, per-agent cost tracking, and full job history in SQLite.

RustGPUISQLiteReact

Dead Drop — Multi-Agent Comms

An MCP server for real-time AI-to-AI message passing across Claude Code sessions: HTTP push transport, team-scoped inboxes, a Drift Protocol (task handshakes, health pings, file ownership), and compaction recovery for context loss.

PythonMCPHTTP

AI Video Generation Lab

A fully local text-to-video pipeline: a FastAPI job queue takes a screenplay, Ollama parses it into scenes, CogVideoX generates a clip per scene on Apple Silicon, and ffmpeg assembles the final MP4 — no cloud dependency.

PythonFastAPICogVideoXOllama

Local RAG Desktop Application

Iterated from CLI to TUI to a native PyQt6 desktop app for semantic search and Q&A over arbitrary codebases; HuggingFace embeddings in SQLite-vec with an Ollama-powered side panel.

PythonPyQt6HuggingFaceSQLite-vec

Raspberry Pi Face & Object Recognition

A 5-phase learning project: hardware setup → real-time face detection → face recognition → object detection → output/alerting, with hardware procurement documented across three budget tiers.

PythonOpenCVRaspberry Pi

Skills