New Article written for the Jewish Press

A Young Orthodox Hardware Designer
More Articles By Rachel Sommer
Rachel Sommer
Posted Oct 06 2010
Respecting our young designer's wishes, we will refer to him by initials only. R.S., an engineer by day and professor by night, is an ambitious and unique individual whom we can all learn from. He graduated college early because as he says, "I could hardly wait to put my hands on the real thing."

At 26 years of age, he is six feet tall, slim and the youngest of three siblings. His keen intellectual prowess is not discernable at first glance. However, besides working as a hardware engineer and teaching in two different colleges, this young and humble man has designed secure communication systems for the government and military for the past five years.

As a college student, R. S. was interested in encryption hardware design and a career path naturally followed. His team designs the chip in missile launching systems - literally the brain in the center. He is very proud of his contribution to the safety of the country. "It's a great feeling knowing you're designing systems and products that protect our freedom," he says.

Even at this young age he is a project manager and in charge of people double his age, and many older employees come to him for professional advice and suggestions.
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Part of what he works on is encryption - a way to send a message to someone without the fear of anybody else reading it. The sender and receiver share a common encryption key. The sender encrypts the message with the key before transmitting it to the receiver, who then decrypts the message before he reads it. Nobody else in the middle can intercept and read the message, since they do not have the key. Without the key, the message is just a random string of characters.

R.S. gives an example: "A simple encryption algorithm, code name 'atbash', like the Hebrew gematria term, involves transposing each character into its opposite character in the alphabet. Therefore, "A" is replaced with "Z" and "B" is replaced with "Y" etc." This program is known as "Transposition Cipher." This is a very simple example; of course in real life the work is much more complicated.

In his line of work, the product has to work 100 percent all the time. The young engineer explains: "Let's say you open your Blackberry and it doesn't work- you're mad; but if you launch a missile and it doesn't hit, then you are dead!"

Knowing that you are designing systems and that people will actually live or die based on how well they operate is exhilarating, he explains with a serious expression on his face. When he watches the test trials of his missile hitting the mock tanks, seeing the debris and explosions, he feels a definite "high." The young scientist does not want to know what it would feel like to not have his design operate in the field; brave soldiers may lose their lives.

When I asked if his job requires constant re-training, R.S. answers: "Although it's a unique field, the competition is fierce. You always have to keep up to date, so I am free to select any training I feel is necessary and the company will send me. My team and I have to be better than good and so we do whatever is necessary to make that happen."

R.S. says that in school you learn just the basics, but in the real world you have to transform all that knowledge into something new, creative and practical based on the current economic conditions. This is the reason why he chose to teach as well; school teaches the theoretical while at work one learns the practical. He tries to bring the practical knowledge into the universities, so that when his students go out and apply for a job, they are ahead of the game.

As busy as this fine young man is, he finds time to play chess, learn with a chavrusa and is even the gabbai in his shul. He also makes the time to do community volunteering and offer a helping hand wherever and whenever he can.


As talented as this fine young man is, it's not easy to be an orthodox Jew in this type of field. All the company's gatherings and parties are on Saturdays, and of course R.S. and a few more orthodox Jewish employees are unable to participate. His dream is to one day be able to open his own company and make things more convenient for his orthodox Jewish employees.