HONEYWELL AEROSPACE / UW

Farrukh Saif

Optical Engineering Specialist at Honeywell Aerospace. I assemble, align, and test spaceborne optical systems, and I still build biomedical imaging instruments at UW: photothermal microscopes, OCT, and the software that turns raw light into an image.

SCROLL TO LAUNCH

01 / APPROACH

From the optical bench to orbit.

Optical Engineering Specialist at Honeywell Aerospace in Cambridge, working on assembly, integration, alignment, and testing of spaceborne optical systems and satellite hardware, including quantum-encryption and quantum-communications payloads. In parallel I am a master’s researcher at UW developing optical imaging systems for biomedical applications.

Honeywell’s Cambridge space operations grew out of COM DEV’s space-hardware business. At PhotoMedicine Labs, supervised by Dr. Parsin Haji Reza, I built a photothermal laser scanning microscope from the ground up: lasers, scanners, relay optics, alignment, and the Python stack that acquires and forms the image. The through-line is the same: hardware, signal, and software as one system.

NOW: Honeywell
LAB: PhotoMedicine
DEGREE: MASc ’26

University of Waterloo

Master of Applied Science, System Design Engineering

PhotoMedicine Labs · Dr. Parsin Haji Reza · Waterloo, ON · Expected Dec. 2026

Middle East Technical University

Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering

Graduated with Honors · Ankara, TR · Jun. 2024

02 / FLIGHT LOG

Experience

01 · Sep. 2026 - Present

Honeywell Aerospace

Optical Engineering Specialist · Cambridge, ON

Assembly, integration, alignment, and testing of spaceborne optical systems and satellite hardware.
Support for quantum-encryption and quantum-communications satellite technology.
Precision optical alignment, optomechanical integration, and aerospace hardware testing.
Part of Honeywell’s Cambridge space operations, originating from COM DEV’s space-hardware business.

AITSpace opticsQuantum commsAlignment

02 · Nov. 2025 - Present

PhotoMedicine Labs

Researcher · UW, ON

Designed and built a photothermal microscope from the ground up: lasers, galvanometer scanners, relay optics, dichroics, objectives, and optomechanics.
Wrote real-time imaging software in Python for acquisition, signal extraction, image formation, and post-processing.
Built a swept-source OCT system and the pipeline for B-scan reconstruction, dispersion compensation, and visualization.
Developed reconstruction, signal processing, and AI-based virtual H&E staining algorithms.

PhotothermalOCTPythonOptics

03 · Mar. 2025 - Jun. 2025

Full Stack Developer · Remote

Ported a C++ computer vision pipeline to WebAssembly so image processing could run in the browser.
Shipped full-stack features and a responsive UI redesign for a platform with 100k+ monthly active users.

C++WebAssemblyUI

04 · May 2023 - Sep. 2024

BrainSTEAM AR Education

Full Stack AR Engineer · Remote

Built an augmented reality education app in Unity with real-time object detection.
Optimized rendering to raise frame rates and reduce device heat on mobile.
Ran CI/CD and automated deploys to the Play Store and App Store.

UnityARCI/CD

05 · Jun. 2023 - Jan. 2024

Ülkem A.Ş.

Machine Learning Engineer · Ankara, Turkey

Collected and curated large-scale preference datasets with Selenium and Microworkers for supervised training.
Built a Flutter platform for collection, annotation, and experiment monitoring, then trained perceived image-quality models for product evaluation.

MLFlutterSelenium

03 / PAYLOADS