Empowering Foundations
Executive Leadership and Advanced Technical Training
One of the benefits of working for Fortune 500 engineering firms is the training! Setting aside all the valuable "corporate policy" mandates, I have had too many to count across categories like these:
Interviewing Skills
Supervisory Skills
Public Speaking
ISO-9001/AS9100 and CMMI
Executive Leadership
Mentoring, Facilitation & Coaching
Handling Difficult Situations
Building Directorates & Capacity for Engineering
A company's product usually mirrors its organizational structure. The work of getting a company healthy often starts with building or rebuilding the infrastructure.
L3Harris | Director of Business Development Operations and Strategy (included Marketing)
Uber ATG | Acting Director of Systems Engineering & Tooling
Uber ATG | Acting Director of Test
In these roles and others, I have stood up the following enterprise tools: CMS, CRM, BI, BPM, LMS, MRP, ERP (click here for the details!)
Accomplished Executive Communicator
Skilled storyteller, bringing complex ideas into focus for each stakeholder - or for the masses:
Regular speaker at All-Hands meetings
Create critical internal and external communications
- Customer facing in during shared strategy sessions, failure investigations, and technical briefings
Build persuasive, informative, and analytic documents including white papers, gap analyses, strategies, execution plans, and proposals
Decades of Mission Critical Experience
​Deep experience supporting commercial and military flight, manned space missions, and highly regulated industries.
Uber ATG | Self-Driving Cars on Public Roads
L3Harris | Atlas, Delta, Ares, and SLS Rocket Avionics; International Space Station and Satellite RF Communications, F35 Lightening II IR Systems
GE Aviation | Commercial and military Jet Engine Controls
United Technologies | Space Shuttle, Boeing 767-400 and Embraer Commercial Airliners, THAAD Missile Defense System, Advanced Prototypes
USAF | Flight critical RF Systems including RADAR, ILS (Glideslope, Localizer), VOR, TACAN
Member of Technical Staff (MTS)
Being a member of the technical staff at an engineering firm is more than just working projects. It includes:
Meeting with customers when they are having their worst days
Helping to align customer expectations with current capabilities
Building technical proposals that will seed future work for many employees over the next decade
Supporting strategic and tactical planning efforts
Mentoring and supporting less experienced engineers
Identifying and resolving technical challenges of all shapes and sizes anywhere along the design process
Negotiating with other departments for our shared success
Being the "glue" and stepping in wherever needed
Performing Systems Engineering
First and foremost, I'm a seasoned technologist that works on the most complex products while mentoring others.
Build and Lead Engineering Technical Teams
Design Systems Architectures for cost, quality, safety (DFx)
Drive Requirements, Requirements Quality Assurance (RQA) Reviews, & Traceability analysis
Lead Failure Review Boards (FRB) and Design Reviews (PDR, CDR)
Testability Engineering
Test Equipment Design, Data Acquisition (DAQ), & Automation Programming
Verification & Validation
Author Technical Standards & Build Reuse Management
Design reviews
Autonomous Vehicle Systems
Having co-reviewed approximately 50 "deep dive" 1.5 hour sessions of autonomous technologies at Uber ATG, I understand the working systems.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications in Autonomous Vehicles
Challenges of calibration
Tooling for optimizing hardware
Tooling for performing post-trip analysis
Fault Management System (FMS)
Troubleshooting Tree to speed diagnostics
Data management
Data reuse, sensors, requirements categories, technical challenges
Rocket Avionics Systems
Sensor electronics (voltage, current, strain, temperature, vibration, frequency)
Nested interacting PID Control Systems
Hydraulic control systems
Fuel control systems
Data Acquisition, logging, and post processing analysis using LabVIEW and National Instruments (NI) hardware
Human Machine Interfaces (HMI) for safety critical testing
Avionics testing practices and automated testing designs
Fault isolation (test equipment vs. unit under test)
Worked closely with United Launch Alliance, NASA, and earlier, United Space Alliance.
Aircraft Avionics Systems
I've worked Aircraft systems multiple times in my career, including:
Infrared Sensing
Jet Engine Control Units (military and commercial)
Generator Control Unit (GCU)
Bus Power Control Units (BPCU)
Auxiliary Power Unit (APU)
Bus Tie Breakers (BTB)
Aircraft Actuators
These included the F35,
Infrared Systems
My time at L3Harris gave me the opportunity to work several IR Products, including:
AAR-44 Circuit Board FRB
F35 EODAS Failure Investigation on Manufacturing, Mechanical, Electrical, Testing, Processes
NightWarrior MicroCam
Six Sigma Black Belt (SSBB)
GE Aviation | Completed the Lean Six Sigma Black Belt program and went on to work on the General Manager's staff as a dedicated SSBB.
L3Harris | Continued working Black Belt projects for the President of Cincinnati Electronics, including leading and mentoring scores of projects and standing up the "Innovations" CI program.
Uber ATG | Used SSBB methods to guide ATG's Business Intelligence team to build better control metrics and dashboards, and stood up the "Velocity" CI program.
Experience Leading Hundreds of Initiatives
No exaggeration here!
From Tiger Teams to Kaizen Events, Failure Review Boards (FRB) to Continuous Improvement projects, there are very few corners of an engineering firm that I haven't touched. Quality, Safety, Legal, Procurement, Parts Management, Tooling, Process Mapping, Instrumentation, Design, Requirements, Testing, Programming... and more.
In my earlier career, I focused on my one engineering role of the moment. But as I progressed, I learned that bridging gaps between roles, groups, and sites gave a much higher ROI to the company.