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Krista Gumiela
"Purdue instilled within me the ability to understand systems of systems and appreciate their dependencies and complexities where they matter. But more - Purdue taught me there is always room for innovation."
Krista Gumiela | Interdisciplinary Engineering and Mechanical Engineering
Deputy Director, GEOspacial INTelligence Mission Systems, Raytheon
From a young age, Krista Gumiela was passionate about satellites and space and dreamed of becoming an engineer. Landing at Raytheon 14 years ago, she found her niche. Quickly advancing through the company, she was named deputy technical director for GEOspacial INTelligence (GEOINT) Mission Systems within Space ISR in 2021. The youngest technical director in the portfolio — and the only woman among her peers — she oversees technical innovation and operational execution of the software systems, supporting the delivery of national security products and services. Recently, she earned additional autonomy to run a newly formed integration center of excellence to enable CI/CD across multiple mission domains.
She has revolutionized legacy waterfall software delivery methods for Raytheon's flagship program, resulting in quantitative impact. Under her leadership as the chief engineer for integration and delivery, the portfolio's flagship program consolidated from seven parallel baselines to a single trunk-based delivery system, accelerating delivery of new capabilities to the customer from an average of 24 months to just six weeks. In addition, her adoption of feature flags, automated regression test batteries, behavior-driven testing, and capability-based design drove impressive efficiencies into program execution.
In previous roles, she worked as a reliability systems engineer for the Advanced Tactical FLIR program, senior system engineer for flight operations on the RODEO program, and chief engineer for integration, test, and delivery IPT on M2C2. She also served six years, including a stint as president, with the Raytheon Young Employee Success Network. She credits Purdue with teaching her that there is always room for innovation.