About

Apple, 2017–2022

Five years in Apple retail, ending as a Genius Bar Technical Expert: hardware and software diagnostics, repairs, case documentation, escalations — and thousands of conversations with people meeting their worst technology day. During 2020–2021 that moved home: remote At-Home Advisor for iPhone and Mac, walking strangers through OS restores and network resets by voice alone, which is technical support played on hard mode. What survives from those years is the discipline of translating between machine and human without condescending to either.

Semiconductor reliability, 2022–present

Equipment reliability engineer at a major semiconductor manufacturer in Austin, responsible for a fleet of process-vacuum pumps. The four case studies on this site come from here: a conversion program worth about $330K a year, the analytics that justified it, a camera network that watches gauges, and the tracker that organized 2,344 equipment reviews. Same job as the Genius Bar, at fab scale: machines fail, people are affected, data decides what happens next.

On AI tools

I use AI the way earlier engineers used CAD: as leverage, not authorship. Eyesight’s firmware, the review tracker’s code, and this site were all built AI-assisted — with requirements, review, testing, and every consequential decision staying human. It has roughly tripled what one engineer can ship, provided the engineer knows exactly what to ask for and how to check the answer.

Education

B.S. Mechanical Engineering with a mathematics minor; Google Project Management certificate.

What I’m after

I don’t necessarily want to build programs. I want to be part of something — I want to look at an everyday item and say I did that, or I was a piece in that. It’s why I worked Apple retail in the first place: I loved the products. And it’s why I moved to advanced manufacturing at the leading edge, where the chips end up in things everyone touches. I like seeing the value I bring, and I want to be known for it.

At work, the pump fleet is literally just me — one engineer. I make the calls, I teach the adjacent process teams what to do when things go wrong, and I do my best work when the pressure is on. I also build tools nobody asked for, because they make my own job easier — even when they have nothing to do with reliability. I just love love love technology: the latest iPhones, AI tools and building things with them I couldn’t have built without them, art, creating in general.

So that’s what I’m looking for next: a team making something people actually use, where I can own a hard problem end to end. Program management, reliability engineering, or technical operations — remote, NYC, or Austin.