I grew up in Twinsburg, Ohio, and went to Miami University, where I double majored in Mechanical Engineering and Physics. In college, I did research in quantum computation, mostly writing Python simulations for the Ph.D. students in the group. I also interned at NASA Glenn’s quantum physics lab, where I built a Franson interferometer, a device that demonstrates particle entanglement.
After school, I joined Raytheon as a systems engineer and spent about five years there working on algorithms for hardware sustainment and readiness. That led to large-scale ML pipelines for manufacturing optimization, and toward the end, ETL pipelines for the wide swath of manufacturing data those models depended on. From there, I moved to Palantir as a Forward Deployed Engineer in USG. I was deployed across a lot of military bases and learned how to work directly with the end user. My path was hardware, then software, then both.
Today, I’m a Forward Deployed Engineer at Arena Physica working with our aerospace and defense customers. Right now, most of my time is on the core product. I’m building a new product primitive in Atlas with our Members of Technical Staff, which has also meant building integrations to the data sources our customers use and migrating parts of our stack to new architectures. I got handed that on day one, which is a good indication of how much responsibility you get here.
The customer side is where that work comes from. I’ve sat alongside test engineers while they ran an aircraft through its test cycle, watched how they actually used our tools, and then went back and changed the tools to make their lives easier. With the electrical engineers, I’ve been building extensions and plugins so Atlas works inside the design software they already use.
I joined Arena Physica because Palantir showed me the FDE role was the right fit for me. I liked being close to the end user, and I liked the rigor. However, I had a strong interest in hardware and wanted to push what AI can do there. Arena Physica had everything I was looking for. I also like that we’re going after all domains of engineering rather than one, because I think that’s what will matter in the long run.
I’ve only been here for a short time, so most of what I’m excited about is still ahead of me. I want to get further embedded in our users’ processes and learn the entire lifecycle, from initial design through simulation and validation to what happens after a board comes back from fab. Hardware development has a lot of hand-offs between people and tools, and each one is a place where something gets lost. I want Atlas to be useful at every one of those steps.
My favorite memory at Arena Physica so far is the four weeks the team spent forward deployed in an Airbnb in LA so we could be onsite with the customer every single day. It was a lot of work but the best part was watching some of the most talented people I’ve ever met work in sync. We shared ideas and debated about how to make the product better. Living and working with your teammates for a month tells you a lot about them, and I liked what I found. It felt like everyone was pulling toward the same thing.
My advice for anyone interested in joining: don’t wait until you feel fully qualified. I came in with a hardware background, a software background, and no experience in EM design. What mattered was how fast I was willing to close that gap. Get comfortable being the least knowledgeable person in the room with a customer’s engineers, ask the basic questions, and then go make the product better because of what you heard. If that sounds like you, we’re actively hiring for Forward Deployed Engineers at arenaphysica.com/careers.
And in classic Arena Physica tradition, here’s my hot take, after four weeks in LA: In-N-Out has great fries.