I started out in hardware, studying electrical engineering and spending my early career doing radar systems research at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and memristor research and development at HP Labs, Hewlett-Packard’s research division. Along the way I earned a couple of master’s degrees in circuit design and engineering through a Marshall Scholarship (a program that funds American students for graduate study in the United Kingdom). I’ve always loved working close to hardware, and still spend a lot of my free time on hobby electronics projects.
Professionally, I kept gravitating toward software because I wanted a faster loop between having an idea and getting something real into a user’s hands. I taught myself to code and spent the next decade building and shipping products at startups, usually as one of the first engineers, across everything from real estate to gig marketplaces to developer tools. Along the way I led engineering at First Round Capital (a venture capital firm), co-founded my own AI company, and did a stretch of forward-deployed contract work with a variety of companies building things in the physical world. Arena Physica feels like my dream job: I get to work closer to hardware again, and both sides of my career background come together.
Today, I’m a Forward Deployed Engineer at Arena Physica, which means I work directly with our customers to build and ship products and features that make a tangible difference in their day-to-day work. I love the process of understanding someone’s problem, figuring out what to build, and delivering an experience that’s specifically impactful to them. It can be challenging to build in real-world environments, where you have to work around existing systems, hardware limitations, and constraints you don’t necessarily control, but that’s also a big part of what makes the work compelling.
I joined for two reasons. First, the problem space: I’ve spent my career circling the boundary between software and the physical world, and Arena Physica is the perfect intersection of that. Second, the team. I came away from my onsite interview thinking these were some of the most curious, capable, and spiky people I’ve met. Folks here also have incredibly deep and varied interests and talents outside of work. I think building a company is a bit like building a good portfolio: you want both quality and range, with people who are exceptionally strong in different directions. Arena Physica has that.
I’m most excited about solving hard, unsolved problems for customers where the solution has to work consistently well under difficult conditions: on-prem deployments, hardware and compute constraints, messy or incomplete data, and integration with legacy systems. I like work where I’m not totally sure going in whether something can be done. There’s no better feeling than getting something difficult to work, and then seeing the result make an obvious difference in someone’s day-to-day life.
One of my favorite memories is from an early deployment, when we got to go on a test drive with a new user on site. It was satisfying to see everything working end to end, but even better to watch his initial skepticism turn into excitement.
My advice for anyone interested in working at Arena Physica: we value people who are excellent at what they do, but also have interesting examples of going unusually deep into other areas of their lives, whether through curiosity, persistence, or just sheer obsession. Don’t be afraid to highlight those things, even if they seem unrelated to the role.
Also, don’t be intimidated by areas of hardware you might be less familiar with. The capabilities available for hardware design, development, testing, and manufacturing are changing so quickly that there’s always more to learn, and working closely with customers will take you into totally new problems and domains. If that sounds like you, we’re actively hiring for Forward Deployed Engineers and Software Engineers — you can learn more at arenaphysica.com/careers!
And in classic Arena Physica tradition, here’s my hot take: I prefer listening to podcasts and audiobooks over music when working out at the gym or during cardio. I have been told this is insane behavior, but I stand by it!