Being an Engineer

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Paul Vizzio is a seasoned hardware engineering leader with deep expertise in building complex electromechanical systems and scaling them from early prototypes to full production. Currently serving as Director of Hardware Engineering at Proteus Motion, Paul led the end-to-end development of a patented 3D resistance training system that has been deployed in more than 400 locations across the U.S. and Canada. His leadership spanned the full product lifecycle—from system architecture and CAD design to manufacturing, supply chain development, and field deployment—culminating in a dramatic cost reduction to approximately 20% of the original prot...

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Yesenia Avellaneda is an engineering leader whose career sits at the intersection of innovation, operations, and impact. Currently a Senior Project Engineer within Global Operations at Abbott, she has built a reputation for turning complex ideas into scalable, high-performing manufacturing systems. From leading New Product Introduction (NPI) efforts to executing international production transfers and launching entirely new facilities, Yesenia thrives where strategy meets execution. 

Her work has had measurable impact. She has led capital projects exceeding $5 million, driven production efficiency improvements, and implemented Lean manufacturing and Six Sigma methodologies to enhance q...

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For more than 40 years, Larry Copponi has been working at the intersection of engineering talent and product innovation. Today, he serves as Vice President of Staffing Solutions at Spanner Product Development, where he helps companies across industries assemble the engineering teams they need to bring complex products to life. 

Larry’s work spans sectors including consumer electronics, robotics, renewable energy, life sciences, and medical devices. His team specializes in placing highly skilled professionals—mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, product designers, industrial designers, and quality engineers—into organizations that are racing to transform ideas i...

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Jordan Kapitanoff is a mechanical engineer by training and a transformation leader by practice. A graduate of Kettering University with a BSME and an MBA from Aurora University, Jordan built his career at the intersection of engineering, operations, and culture change. Over the years, he has consistently stepped into roles where systems, teams, and processes needed elevation — and delivered measurable results. 

At Bison Gear & Engineering, Jordan moved from Application Engineer to Innovator, and later to Supervisor of Quality Innovation and Sustainability Engineering Manager. There, he led initiatives grounded in A3 problem sol...

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Amelia Howe is a biomedical engineer and R&D project manager whose career spans startups, research labs, and established medical device companies. She currently leads cross-functional development programs at COLTENE, where she coordinates teams across engineering, quality, regulatory, and manufacturing to bring new medical devices from concept to international launch.

Amelia’s journey into engineering began with a pivotal shift early in her academic career. While studying at The University of Akron, she transitioned from nursing to biomedical engineering after discovering the field through biomechanics research. Working in Dr. Brian Davis’s la...

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Rod Scholl is the Founder and Principal Analyst at Epsilon FEA, an engineering services company he launched in 2008 to specialize in advanced numerical analysis and simulation-driven problem solving. With nearly two decades at the helm, Rod has built Epsilon FEA into a trusted partner for companies tackling challenging structural, thermal, and dynamic performance problems across a wide range of industries.

Before founding Epsilon FEA, Rod spent over a decade at PADT, Inc. as a Specialist Engineer in Analysis. There, he led and executed FEA projects using the ANSYS toolset, supporting everything...

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Dr. Mahantesh Hiremath has built a rare engineering career at the intersection of deep technical rigor, systems thinking, leadership, and service. Across more than three decades, he has worked in space, energy, transportation, and infrastructure, and is recognized as one of the few engineers to have designed and analyzed complex systems in four very different environments: deep underground, offshore, on-ground, and in space. His academic background includes M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from The Ohio State University, along with a certificate in systems engineering from Stanford University. 

Much of Mahantesh’s i...

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Ryan Schoonmaker has spent roughly two decades in medical device product development, building a career around solving hard engineering problems in high-stakes environments. Today he is the founder of Tight Line Solutions, where he works with growth-stage product development teams to reduce chaos, improve execution, and build the kind of systems that make technical organizations more efficient and predictable. His messaging consistently emphasizes that innovation is not just about ideas, but about disciplined execution, sound principles, and the ability to lead teams through complexity. 

Before launching Tight Line Solutions in late 2025, R...

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In this special role-reversal episode of the Being An Engineer podcast, longtime host Aaron Moncur steps into the guest seat while previous guest Mike Romance takes over as interviewer.

Aaron shares the story behind his journey from a laid-back childhood growing up in Hawaii to becoming the founder of Pipeline Design & Engineering in Phoenix, Arizona. After being laid off during the 2009 recession, Aaron faced a moment of uncertainty that ultimately pushed him to start his own engineering business—learning sales, marketing, and leadership along the way. What began as a one-person co...

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Joe Couitt is the founder of JMC Swiss Solutions, a Phoenix-based consulting firm dedicated to CNC Swiss applications and machining optimization. With more than a decade of hands-on experience in high-precision manufacturing, Joe has built a career grounded in programming, setup, prototyping, and department-level leadership.

Joe began his machining career at Aerospace Contacts LLC, where he developed a strong foundation in precision manufacturing. From there, he advanced into CNC programming and screw machining roles, eventually becoming the head of the Screw Machine Department at Korral Kool. In that role, he led...

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Chad Walters is an experienced product design leader with more than two decades of experience developing complex products across healthcare, life sciences, aerospace, defense, and commercial markets. As the first industrial designer at a major engineering-focused design center in the Raleigh-Durham area, Chad helped establish and grow a strong user-centered design presence within an organization traditionally driven by engineering and manufacturing excellence.

Throughout his career, Chad has led multidisciplinary teams in the development of products ranging from large-scale interactive vending systems like the Coca-Cola Freestyle to advanced surgical robotics platforms and...

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Mustafa Poonawala is a globally recognized leader in medical device and diagnostics innovation, known for his ability to translate strategy into execution across R&D, clinical operations, and portfolio management. Over a career spanning more than two decades, he has built and led world-class engineering and program teams, guided products from early development through regulatory approval, and driven large-scale organizational transformation in highly regulated environments.

Currently, Mustafa is the CEO of DynaMill Research, a specialized Clinical Research Organization focused on helping diagnostics companies dramatically reduce cycle times and improve cost predictability...

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Watch the webinar here!

Great engineering alone does not guarantee product success.

Achieving product-market fit—ensuring that a product truly meets user needs and expectations—requires integrating market insights, usability considerations, and business goals into the development process.

But how can engineers quantify something that often seems subjective?

In this PDX Webinar, Arne Lang-Ree, Chief Design Officer and Cofounder at Spanner, will demonstrate how product-market fit can be transformed into a practical engineering objective.

Drawing on real-world tools and frameworks developed at Spanner, this...

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In this final episode of the three-part series on accelerating the speed of engineering, Aaron Moncur and Brad Hirayama zoom out to focus on the organizational and cultural levers that compound over time.

While earlier episodes explored how individuals and teams can move faster, this conversation tackles the bigger picture—how companies structure their environments, decision-making, and culture to consistently deliver results.

They break down practical strategies like vertically integrating key capabilities to reduce dependency on vendors, staying close to the production floor to improve decision-making, and building psychological sa...

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In part two of this three-part series on accelerating the speed of engineering, Aaron Moncur and Brad Hirayama shift the focus from individual habits to team workflows. Drawing from patterns that have surfaced across 300+ Being An Engineer interviews, they explore how better systems can help teams move faster from idea to hardware to validation. 

Brad and Aaron dig into practical ways to reduce wasted time and avoid preventable mistakes: defining requirements clearly, validating what actually matters, prototyping early, running strong design reviews, using checklists, testing options in parallel, involving manufacturing sooner, a...

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Watch this flash training here: https://youtu.be/QCy9i4TB2b4

When engineers design parts in isolation, it’s easy to unintentionally introduce dozens of slightly different fastener lengths into an assembly. That might not seem like a big deal during CAD, but it becomes a real problem on the shop floor.

In this short engineering pro tip, Pipeline automation engineer Mark Blakey explains a simple strategy he uses in SOLIDWORKS to standardize screw lengths across an assembly. By adjusting counterbore features and editing the Hole Wi...

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In this special kickoff to a three-part miniseries, Aaron Moncur and Brad Hirayama explore one of the most important—and often overlooked—skills in engineering: how to accelerate the speed of engineering work without sacrificing quality. Drawing insights from more than 300 episodes of the Being An Engineer podcast, Aaron has distilled recurring lessons from experienced engineers into 21 practical best practices. In this first episode, Aaron and Brad break down the first seven strategies that help engineers move faster, solve problems more effectively, and create more value for their teams and companies.  

The c...

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Pipeline Design & Engineering

About Pipeline
Pipeline solves difficult manufacturing problems through automation, custom equipment, fixtures, and product development. We also build community through PDX, the Being An Engineer podcast, CAD Club, meetups, webinars, and The Wave.

The Role
We’re hiring a relationship-first Business Development leader. This is not a transactional sales role. We’re looking for someone who can build trust with engineering leaders and manufacturing teams, spot opportunity, and turn relationships into partnerships.

What Makes It Different
...

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Daniel Gledhill is a seasoned manufacturing and engineering leader whose career bridges high-risk industrial operations and precision-driven medical device manufacturing. Daniel leads engineering teams responsible for multiple production areas supporting transcatheter heart valve delivery systems—products where quality, reliability, and patient safety are absolutely critical.

Daniel’s journey to medical devices began in heavy industry, where he worked as a process, chemical, and metallurgical engineer at Rio Tinto, including leadership roles at copper smelters overseeing sulfuric acid plants, powerhouses, and byproduct operations. These early roles shaped his systems-level thinking, comfort with comp...

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After more than 300 episodes of conversations with engineers, founders, and technical leaders, certain patterns start to emerge. 

In this special retrospective episode of Being An Engineer, Aaron Moncur and Brad Hirayama flip the mic around to distill the biggest lessons learned from six years of interviews. Instead of focusing on any single quote or guest, they zoom out and identify the recurring themes that consistently show up in the careers of high-performing engineers. 

Surprisingly, none of the top takeaways are about mastering CAD tools or memorizing GD&T standards. 

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In this episode, we join Matt Ketterer, a seasoned engineer, at Pipeline Media Studio's inaugural session. Matt shares his career journey, from his initial foray into mechanical engineering to his pivotal shift towards controls and software engineering. He discusses his early days at a medical device company, his methodical approach to learning and applying new skills, and the importance of reading technical manuals, which aided his transition into controls engineering.

 Matt also offers insights into balancing mechanics and software, fostering curiosity, and the holistic thinking required for successful engineering projects. Ideal f...

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Mike Romance has spent nearly two decades operating at the intersection of manufacturing engineering, automation, validation, and operations leadership within the life-sciences ecosystem. His career spans startups and established organizations alike, with hands-on experience taking products from early development through GMP-ready, high-volume production. Across roles in process development, automation, quality systems, and manufacturing strategy, Mike has built a reputation for combining technical rigor with pragmatic execution.

Most recently at Quantum-Si, Mike played a central role in scaling operations to support the commercialization of the Platinum protein sequencing platform while laying the...

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Bob Hankins brings over 20 years of dedicated experience in the medical-device industry, spanning engineering leadership, product development, process improvement and strategic technical oversight. As Director of Engineering at TE Connectivity, he leads a global team of engineers and scientists focused on designing, developing and delivering innovative customer-centric medical device solutions—particularly complex machined, extruded and laser-cut components. In this role he ensures design for manufacturing and quality within ISO 13485-compliant systems, marrying deep technical understanding with regulatory-driven manufacturing discipline.

Before his current role Bob led Research & Product Development Engineering at Nordson Me...

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Scott Roberts is the North American Regional Sales Manager for Bodycote’s S³P technologies, where he oversees the sales team and rep network responsible for bringing one of the most unique surface hardening processes to manufacturers across the country. The S³P family of treatments—including Kolsterising—uses low-temperature carbon diffusion to create exceptionally hard, wear-resistant surfaces while preserving the corrosion resistance that stainless steels and cobalt-chromium alloys are valued for.

Scott didn’t begin his career in materials science or engineering, yet he has built deep expertise in helping engineers...

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Scott Heimendinger is an engineer and inventor whose career spans business intelligence at Microsoft and IBM, to cutting-edge food-tech innovation. Early in his career he served as a program manager at Microsoft, then pivoted into culinary science, co-founding the pioneering sous-vide company Sansaire, which raised over $823 K via Kickstarter to make sous-vide accessible to home cooks.

He then moved into roles of increasing technical depth: at Modernist Cuisine he developed robotics, motion-control systems, microscopy, visual engineering and more; at Anova he led the development of the Anova Precision Oven — a home-focused co...

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In this short trailer, Pipeline Design & Engineering announces a new service we quietly piloted in 2025—and are officially opening up in 2026. 

Pipeline is a team of engineers who design and build custom machines, fixtures, and automation systems for manufacturers working on complex, real-world problems. Like most engineering teams, we rely heavily on custom machined parts—and over the years, we’ve developed a trusted overseas manufacturing supply chain to support our own work. 

This episode tells the story of how a single difficult-to-manufacture part led us to test that supply c...

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Aaron Eden brings more than three decades of building, testing, and shipping practical innovation. At Intuit, he focuses on AI-driven process automation; partnering with product, operations, and analyst communities to eliminate manual toil and design customer-centric solutions at scale. His posts highlight ongoing hiring and growth around intelligent automation and a practitioner’s mindset toward measurable impact.

Before Intuit, Aaron co-founded Moves the Needle, where he helped Fortune-scale organizations adopt lean startup and design thinking behaviors. Through executive mentoring and enterprise programs, he guided leaders to shorten time-to-market and increase employee en...

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Presented by Mike Landis, Director of Engineering at Pipeline Design & Engineering 

In this PDX Webinar, Mike Landis shares the practical project management framework Pipeline uses to manage engineering development projects, balancing budget, schedule, scope, and risk. 

The session includes a walkthrough of Pipeline’s engineering project budget and schedule tracking spreadsheet, refined over 20 years of real-world use. 

View the webinar and download the traveler here (must be registered on The Wave to view): https://www.thewave.engineer/product-development-expo/pdx-webinars/practical-project-management-for-engineering-teams-with-mike-landis-r9/

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This episode is a recording of a webinar with guest Chris Denney.

Watch the recording for free on The Wave.

Think your manufacturer keeps screwing up your circuit boards? The truth might be that the design itself is setting them up to fail.

In this webinar, we uncover the most common PCB design mistakes that frustrate manufacturers — and how engineers can prevent them.

This session is geared toward mechanical engineers who want to better understand how board layout and design choices impact manufacturability, co...

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This episode is a rerun.

Andrew and Lisa are Menlonians (team members at Menlo Innovations). They do things different there. And even though they develop software products, the processes they use are supremely applicable to developing hard goods products, as well. Join us as we discuss “the Menlo way” and paired work, kindergarten skills, storycards, and other methods of producing the right product, on budget, and on schedule.

Subscribe to the show to get notified so you don't miss new episodes every Friday.

The Being An Engineer podc...

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This episode is a rerun.

Rob Donley has a deep understanding of how engineering works. Kicking off his engineering career from a young age building RC cars and model rockets, he has provided design and leadership capabilities for many companies over the years, and brings to the table not just the ability to design something, but to understand the many facets that accompany development of a new product such as manufacturing, supply chain, financial strategy, and project management. 

Subscribe to the show to get notified so y...

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Join us on-site at Stryker as we explore the world of packaging engineering with Eric Richins, a packaging engineer with 10 years of experience in the industry. In this insightful interview, Eric discusses the various aspects of packaging from primary to tertiary, highlighting the importance of packaging in maintaining product sterility and efficiency in production. He shares intriguing details about the automation of packaging processes, the regulatory challenges faced, and the critical role packaging plays in the medical device industry. Eric offers a behind-the-scenes look at the complexities of packaging engineering and what it...

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In this special format-breaking episode of the Being An Engineer podcast, Aaron and Brad sit down together—no guest, no script—to talk through an issue almost every engineer has bumped into at some point: the slow erosion of professional communication.

The conversation starts with a LinkedIn post Brad wrote after experiencing repeated ghosting during his job search—even after multi-hour onsite interviews and commitments from hiring managers. That sparks a broader discussion about the shifting expectations around communication in today’s workforce, how different generations approach feedback and follow-through, and what’s d...

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In this special episode, Aaron and Brad introduce Pipeline Media Lab (PML) — a new initiative built for engineers, by engineers.

We talk about why we’re creating PML: engineers don’t need more ads, they need education, practical insights, and real stories from people solving hard problems. PML brings all of that into one ecosystem—podcasts, events, webinars, community, and more—to help engineers learn, grow, and stay connected to what’s happening across the engineering world.

We share the vision behind PML, what it means for th...

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Few people enter the MedTech world because of a personal experience with the technology itself—but for Brent Lavin, that’s exactly where it began. At just 23 years old, a CT scan that revealed an urgent medical issue also sparked a lifelong passion for medical technology and its power to save lives. That moment became the foundation of a career devoted to driving innovation in healthcare.

Brent’s early engineering work revealed an exceptional talent for connecting technical possibility with human need. Over the next two decades, he would lead cross-functional teams...

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Brogan Miller, PE is a startup veteran, product engineer, and the founder of Doula Studios, a consultancy dedicated to helping early-stage hardware companies bring their ideas into reality. Calling himself a “doula for startups,” Brogan supports entrepreneurs as they navigate the often-chaotic birth of new products, offering hard-won wisdom, technical expertise, and a get-it-done mindset.

Brogan’s career path has been anything but ordinary. He’s held pivotal roles as one of the earliest employees at several startups, including Sensel, AliveCor, Trove Foods, and Typhur, where he designed and launched everything from ult...

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Rick James is the Chief Executive Officer at SimuTech Group, North America’s largest ANSYS Elite Channel Partner. With a 25+ year career at the intersection of mechanical and electrical engineering, he has spearheaded multi-million dollar projects, FEA analyses, drop testing, and reliability-driven design efforts in industries from semiconductors to medical devices.

Holding a Doctor of Engineering in Engineering Management and both BSME and MSME degrees from Southern Methodist University, Rick blends deep technical expertise with strategic insight. He began his career at Texas Instruments, tackling IC packaging and structural analysis, progressing th...

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Our guest today is Jeremy Jarrett, an attorney at Sacks Tierney in Scottsdale, Arizona, where he focuses on corporate, securities, and finance law. Jeremy brings more than 10 years of experience advising businesses on complex transactions, including mergers and acquisitions, spin-offs, recapitalizations, commercial lending, and equity and debt financings. His clients have ranged from early-stage startups to large public companies, spanning industries such as technology, oilfield services, agriculture, defense contracting, automotive, and manufacturing.

In addition to representing venture capital-backed companies in financing transactions, Jeremy has played a key role in...

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Ryan Stevenson is a versatile mechanical engineer whose career spans high-profile tech companies, outdoor gear innovators, and entrepreneurial ventures. After earning his Master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from Boise State University, Ryan launched into product development roles that combined advanced CAD, manufacturing engineering, and user-focused design.

He contributed to Apple’s Vision Products Group, where he helped shape the Vision Pro by developing complex surfaces and leading the design of components in the Light Seal system. Earlier, at Cascade Designs, Ryan worked on next-generation Thermarest products, applying his technical expertise to f...

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This episode is a rerun.

In this fascinating episode of Being an Engineer, our host Aaron Moncur sits down with Greg Mark, a visionary entrepreneur who revolutionized 3D printing with Markforged and is now transforming design workflows with his AI company, Backflip. Greg shares insights into his entrepreneurial journey, technological innovations, and the power of persistence.

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