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I joined Grounded as CTO and rebuilt the company's manufacturing operation from the ground up. We grew revenue 4× year-over-year — from $1.4M to $5.5M — by delivering ten custom specialty electric vehicles at 20–40% gross margins. That run was the first time the business had unit economics it could build a funding story on, and we got there by cutting per-vehicle material cost 25%, warranty rates from 100% to under 30%, and lifting on-time delivery from 0% to 75% in the first six months.

I rebuilt the workforce to fifteen people across engineering, finance, technicians, and floor leads, and I turned a disorganized 8,000 sq ft space into a five-vehicle-per-month production facility in roughly a month — designing the material flow, JIT scheme, and work cells from scratch. I also stood up an AI-enabled MES/MRP in three weeks: the company's first digital work order, scheduling, and floor visibility system, replacing every manual process we'd inherited.

On the supply chain side, I built the vendor base from zero across more than twenty suppliers, negotiated about $1M in annual spend contracts, and drove a 25% reduction in per-vehicle material cost versus initial production. I also built the operational financial model and the dynamic pricing calculators across every product line, so sales could quote custom builds with confidence without giving up unit economics.

I was the senior hardware manager for satellite integration at Amazon Kuiper (now Amazon Leo). I built and owned the operational case for the entire end-to-end satellite factory — and got it funded. The way we got there was an exhaustive, bottom-up exercise: I built a complete document that listed every single operation for every in-house assembled or manufactured part, every PCBA test, and every step of satellite-level assembly, plus the full set of test plan scenarios. I worked the document with the chief engineer to validate, downselect, and lock the operational sequence, and that document is what informed how many integration stations, shake tables, thermal chambers, and pieces of test equipment we actually needed.

From there I sized utilities — power, gas, vacuum, clean dry air, ESD-controlled space — straight off that operations document. The utility load drove the square footage, the square footage drove the layout, and the layout drove the budget. I used planned launch rates and Cape Canaveral processing times to back-solve the throughput the factory had to hit, which fed straight back into station count and shift design. I then worked with Amazon's real estate teams to downselect a location — toured a long list of greenfield and brownfield sites and authored the downselection paper for what to buy or lease. From that work I authored and secured a $200M capital proposal, signed off by Amazon Devices and Finance SVPs. We delivered the factory on time in under 18 months.

Once the building existed, I scaled final assembly throughput from one satellite per month to one per day on a $17M annual capex budget. I built and led a 40-person organization spanning TPMs, engineers, production managers, and technicians, and wrote the workforce development playbook the org ran on — leveling matrices, promotion criteria, hiring plans, and onboarding. I also owned the MES program end-to-end: I wrote the requirements, ran a five-platform trade study, negotiated a $3.5M SAP contract, and managed an eight-person consultant team through go-live. Six months from contract signing to MVP go-live, with all 100+ users trained and the part data loaded in. It was the first in-house MES system Amazon ever deployed.

On the program side, I was the manufacturing lead for the first-ever Kuiper prototype and delivered six R&D satellite programs on or ahead of schedule, including the first two operational Kuiper satellites in space.

At Astra I designed the detailed floor plan and material flow for a brand-new 100,000 sq ft rocket manufacturing facility, then stood up the first rocket engine production lines from scratch in three months. That meant sourcing, qualifying, and leading installation of every piece of assembly-line equipment and tooling that went into them.

I led manufacturing process development for more than twenty LOx/Kerosene rocket engines built across three vehicle programs, including new welding process qualification for high-temperature 3D-printed Inconel and orbital tube weld joints. I also wrote the requirements and ran procurement for the capital equipment behind those processes — automated orbital tube welding, CNC tube bending, and a set of custom integration fixtures and tooling we needed to make the lines run.

I was a lead manufacturing engineer for Falcon 9 Stage 1 final integration. On the floor, I directed 3 engineers and thirty-plus technicians across propulsion, avionics, structural integration, and systems testing. Across ten vehicles I drove primary structural integration hours down 41% — from roughly 6,000 to roughly 3,500 man-hours — through process redesign, tooling upgrades, and continuous DFM collaboration with the design teams.

I was the manufacturing liaison on a $2M tooling program — the Thrust Structure Integration Cart 2.0 — partnering with the design lead through concept, build, and qualification; the cart removed a full shift from the final integration build cycle on its own. I also authored the first fully approved final integration work order in SpaceX history for a new Falcon 9 configuration, which eliminated more than two days of critical path time and set the documentation standard the program ran on after that.

I was the manufacturing lead on the first article Falcon Heavy build and delivered all of the work instructions, tooling, supply chain coordination, and hands-on assembly for a four-person engineering team. Over a one-year period I ranked #5 across all SpaceX engineering and #1 on the manufacturing team for build issues resolved, and I was a reviewer and signee on more than 125 flight assembly drawings.