Jake Teufert

Jake Teufert has had a diverse and successful career in engineering. Jake began their career in 2007 as a Research Assistant at the Florida Institute of Technology, where they programmed an in-house Gibbs free energy minimization combustion code and created a frozen flow and shifting equilibrium rocket nozzle model. In 2008, they joined United Space Alliance as a Pyrotechnic Systems Engineer, where they managed lot acceptance and service life extension for Shuttle SRB pyrotechnics, ordnance, and separation rocket motors. In 2011, they worked as a Propulsion Engineer (Contractor) at Aerojet Rocketdyne, where they supported development and qualification testing of MR-104H hydrazine monopropellant engine and upgrades to R-42 hypergolic engine. In 2012, they joined Orbital ATK as a Propulsion Engineer, where they executed acceptance and service life extension testing of solid rocket motors and pyrotechnic hardware for the Ground-based Missile Defense (GMD) program. In 2014, they became the Lead Propulsion Engineer at Masten Space Systems, where they designed and fired a 25,000 lbf LNG/LOX pressure-fed engine built entirely using additive manufacturing and executed a redesign of Masten Scimitar to increase thrust by 20%. In 2017, they co-founded Tesseract, where they served as Chief Engineer. In 2020, they joined Benchmark Space Systems as Chief Engineer.

Jake Teufert attended the Florida Institute of Technology from 2004 to 2007, where they earned a Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in Aerospace Engineering. Jake returned to the same school from 2013 to 2014, where they received a Master of Science (M.S.) in Space Systems. In 2017, they attended Y Combinator's S17 Batch.