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Empowering Foundations

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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.

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