Silicon Valley startups are small,fast, lean. Aerospace companies can be big and slow and stodgy. Skybox Imaging is a Silicon Valley startup that's building a constellation of satellites to deliver high-resolution earth images.

Our story is about distributed, heterogeneous systems and Big Data Hadoop clusters. It's a story in which Waterfall meets Test-Driven Development and Continuous Delivery. It's about QA, DevOps and Mission Operations. It’s about developing software and designing and building hardware – some of which flies in space.

At Skybox, we tear down walls. In this talk I will describe some of those walls and how we have dealt with them – or not! We will look at the road ahead and the technical, cultural and logistical challenges we'll face as we build a sustainable, scalable organization.