Scott Volk
Scott is a systems engineer whose career follows a consistent pattern: find the best available research or practice in a field, operationalize it under real conditions, and field test it until it works.
He began in Canada's optical telecommunications sector, developing low-cost deployment strategies using off-the-shelf hardware to replicate expensive equipment capabilities, writing field support protocols for technicians with limited literacy, and leading cross-functional diagnostic teams through outages that were simultaneously technical, organizational, and human failures.
Mentored by former U.S. defense-industry embedded engineers in the renewables sector, he built firmware for distributed energy systems, designed statechart-based microgrid inverters/chargers, and developed DSP techniques that eliminated expensive transducers. His work included phase-locked loops, anti-islanding algorithms, and advanced battery-charging algorithms. Hardware that fails in this domain kills equipment or starts fires.
In 2013 he founded an education startup built around a Bayesian inference engine for adaptive arithmetic training. Field testing revealed that the limiting factor was not numeracy or memory, it was performance under pressure. Children failing arithmetic were failing emotional regulation. He filed this away.
In 2017, contracted to build boot management systems for utility-scale three-phase power inverters, he was handed a pre-launch hardware crisis: flash memory that was corrupting itself, carrying encrypted data, expected to be solved in firmware. He reached for a best practice and found the OODA loop. It solved the problem. He also recognized that the same framework applied to what he had observed in children under learning pressure, and to adult performance under any kind of operational stress.
Missionloops was built from that convergence. The platform uses AI to deliver OODA-loop structured doctrine to operators in real time, tracking each person's knowledge state and surfacing what they need to know when they need to know it. Nine specialized agents adapt to mission type, drawing on a curriculum graph built from validated doctrine. The architecture integrates large language models, retrieval-augmented generation, and graph analysis in service of a specific operational outcome: people and organizations that can think clearly, decide quickly, and act effectively under hard, messy, high-stakes conditions.
The problem Scott is currently focused on is civil defence. NATO has identified cognitive warfare against civilian populations as a primary and growing threat to democratic societies. Missionloops is designed to be part of the answer: building populations that are innovative, cognitively resilient, and hard to manipulate.
Email: scott (at) missionloops (dot) ca