Profile Details
As the associate director of engineering and technology, Mr. Ray Gauss works closely with the rest of the leadership team, technology division heads, and other key individuals to nurture the tremendous engineering and technical talent at the institute. In this role, he oversees the Science Operations and Engineering Division; the Systems Engineering, Integration and Test, and Operations Division; the Data Management Division; and the Information Technology Services Division.
Mr. Gauss brings over 25 years of experience in technical and leadership roles across both industry and government sectors to the institute. He’s guided cross-functional engineering teams, driven Agile, security, and DevSecOps (development, security, and operations) transformations, and championed open-source and cloud-native innovation.
Prior to joining STScI, he served as the senior director of architecture and engineering at Slingshot Aerospace, headquartered in Windsor, Colorado, where he guided teams to collaboratively design and develop scalable platforms that enabled real-time space-domain awareness and operational decision-making for commercial and government customers.
Before Slingshot, he served as director of innovation at Easy Dynamics in McLean, Viriginia, where he worked across teams to deliver solution accelerators and develop methodologies for many different government agencies. While there, he also identified opportunities for product and platform development, and contributed to several open-source initiatives and standards bodies.
Previous to that role, Mr. Gauss served as a software architect at Alfresco, an open-source enterprise content and process management software company. He led the architecture and implementation of shared platform services and infrastructure, integrations with other vendors’ end-user applications, and developed a digital asset management module.
Before Alfresco, Mr. Gauss co-founded and served as the chief technology officer of RightsPro in Bethesda, Maryland, a software as a service (SaaS) marketplace for intellectual property licensing agreements. In these roles, he negotiated partnerships, contributed to open-source initiatives and standards bodies, defined the product direction, architecture, and development plan for the company, and coordinated its marketing.
Even as an intern at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, Mr. Gauss was able to combine his interests in technology and astronomy while supporting a cosmic ray experiment.
In his spare time, Mr. Gauss is a performing musician and enjoys boating with his family on the Chesapeake Bay.
Education:
BS in Astrophysics, University of Maryland