Software Design: Jobs Landed

After participating in 2005 to the LHC particle accelerator design at CERN, the goal for my career was to further improve my education in advanced fields of engineering. The decision was driven by the fact that the requirements for LHC project did not allow errors or billions would have been wasted for a wrong design. As a young engineer I was impressed how nowadays you have the tools to simulate reality in its minimal details and deliver accurate results before any prototype has been built. Given my natural curiosity and the desire to understand “what is under the hood”, I decided I wanted to be able to develop such tools, rather than simply being a user of them. Moreover the desire of studying this field represented the perfect fit for my background in classical engineering and the personal passion for programming.

For these reasons in 2006 I moved to Chicago to study for a PhD in multibody dynamics with a project founded by Caterpillar. After earning my PhD I continued my research activity working for CAT in the Chicago area. In December 2011 I was offered a position in Ann Arbor by MSC.Software, the worldwide leader in virtual prototyping and owner of products like NASTRAN and ADAMS. MSC collaborated with NASA since the 60s to develop NASTRAN for aerospace programs, while ADAMS was born at the University of Michigan in the 1974 and through the years become the reference in multibody dynamic simulation software. Just to mention one of the last achievements, ADAMS played a key role in designing the rover Curiosity that NASA landed on Mars on August 5th 2012, especially for the ability to simulate conditions of operation unattainable on the Earth.

With the above premises it was obvious for me to accept the position and move to Ann Arbor, since it represented the possibility to work and learn from the people who made the history in my field of studying. The initial project from the 70s is still the core of today software – showing how much a good initial design can be durable – and some people who currently work at MSC in Ann Arbor have almost 30 years of experience in dynamic simulation. Every day I go to work I am amazed how much I can learn from the experience of my colleagues, wishing one day to have their same strength in this field.

It has to be underlined that the driven factor for virtual prototyping is not just the advantage of cutting costs and a faster deliverable design, but mostly the possibility to simulate conditions which are not easy to reproduce in real life and to perform optimization algorithms on virtual models unattainable with standard techniques. For these reasons the areas of application include typical engineering fields like aerospace, automotive, rail-road systems, while new developments in the medical field are the frontier of simulation. For instance using fluid-dynamics equations to model the blood inside human body is just fascinating and opens the possibility of studying new treatments for illnesses. I believe this is a valuable field where engineers and doctors can work together for making a positive impact on our society, as well as predicting the life of an aircraft, car or high-speed train via dynamic simulation makes everyday life safer.

After years working for various security software companies on the coasts I realized that this work could be done just about anywhere—as long as the company had access to talent. While I certainly enjoy everything that tier one cities have to offer, they never felt like a permanent home to me or my wife. She grew up in Brighton, Michigan, and when I came across Duo Security—and saw that they were based in Ann Arbor—I decided to explore them further.

Turns out Duo is about as close as you can get to a hip, San Francisco software startup... just 2,000 miles east. We're backed by Google Ventures and True Ventures. We have an amazing office culture, outstanding team, and founders that care about building the company in Michigan.

I never saw a job posting, but instead decided to email the founders, Jon and Dug, to ask them if they were considering future product or marketing hires. Turns out they were. After interviewing in person and finding it was even more a fit than it appeared on paper, my wife and I moved to Ann Arbor just a month later. It's turned out to be one of the best life decisions I've ever made. Ann Arbor is a perfect mix of big city taste with small town accessibility. I'm no longer jet setting on planes all the time, or spending $18 an hour to park in the city. It's good to be here.

I am a co-founder and the President of Practical EHR Solutions, LLC (Pehr), a software developer and service provider that helps physicians increase productivity and profitability.  Pehr is developing software that will educate and guide healthcare professionals through the implementation of 44 best practice initiatives, most of which are the result of the constantly changing regulatory environment in healthcare and the increasing technical skill set needed for compliance. While the software is in development, Pehr is focusing on providing Electronic Health Record implementation services directly to physician practices. My most previous job was as the Chief Operating Officer of a 50 physician multispecialty group where she and the other Pehr co-founders developed an implementation methodology that allows physicians to achieve a positive return on their EHR investment.
 
Along with my team, I launched the organization in January 2011 in Ann Arbor, feeling there is no better place for a healthcare IT start-up organization.

My primary responsibility is for the delivery of our software and services, but like everyone else working for a startup company, I wear many hats.  From day to day I can be doing sales, project management, or software design.

With seven years as a professional web application developer, I am the point man for adopting emerging technologies for business use.  I have solid knowledge of PHP, MySQL, HTML5, FLEX and other standards, and the creative problem-solving skills from an artistic training. I hold an M.F.A. in Digital Imaging from Rochester Institute of Technology. In my copious spare time, I write apps for iPhone/iPad.

I am part of the SRT team building custom software solutions for automotive, manufacturing, marketing, technology, and on-line health management companies. My area of expertise is in object oriented and relational database design. I have extensive experience with Java and J2EE technologies, Oracle, and multiple open source development frameworks and tools, with recent experience developing mobile apps on the Android platform and building web services in Java with Hibernate (ORM), and the Spring IOC framework.

Mobiata is a startup that creates best-selling mobile travel applications for multiple platforms including iPhone/iPad, Android, Blackberry, and Palm. We like coffee and brownies so much we recently moved to an office across from Comet Coffee in Nickel's Arcade.

I'm currently working on iPhone/iPad apps and I'm having the time of my life. Since starting eight months ago, I've worked on a half dozen apps and confronted many unique design and development challenges. I even did some Spanish localization for FlightTrack! Yeah! If you were a Spanish major in undergrad, you would be excited too. We've come such a long way since I've been on board, and I can't wait to see where we are in another few months!

Mobiata creates mobile apps that are designed to make traveling simpler and more fun for users. The purpose of my role is to help ensure that our users find our apps to be as valuable and easy to use as possible. I do this by monitoring, responding to, and analyzing user feedback from a variety of channels. I then use that data to propose and advocate for app design and usability enhancements. Our users give invaluable feedback; it challenges us to stay at the cutting edge of design and helps us maintain our high standard of delivering a top-notch user experience.?

At my job I perform typical office managing tasks such as answering phones, greeting clients and ordering supplies. I do that all while working with our CFO to maintain office finances, invoices and payments. I also create and manage marketing, newsletters and other social media avenues via Internet such as our Facebook fan page, Twitter account and LinkedIn groups. Related to this I work as a project manager for our social media clients' accounts as well. One of my favorite parts of my job is that I not only organize events for the company but I work with the team to come up with the marketing, create it, monitor, host and participate all while getting to work with the clients on a daily business.

I work on a small team of people charged with identifying high-potential companies that warrant free consulting/support on Google's AdWords platform. Most companies that advertise online sign up on their own and never speak with anyone at Google. For larger/complex campaigns, we find it's a win-win to proactively reach out and offer our expertise for free to ensure a campaign is successful and sustainable.

I manage the creation, strategy and execution of marketing campaigns while keeping aligned with a business development team to drive lead generation for our Supply chain management software solutions.

I work on a team with other Product Managers to help define content for future releases for a specific product line.

My main activities are finding new likely prospects for MyBuys on the internet, and then contacting them and getting them interested in our service. It's mostly phone calls, and the goal is to schedule a time for one of our account executives to talk with the person and present them our solution.

I'm self-employed, so while I do everything in my company, I like to be doing software design and implementation the most. I'm currently focused on building applications for Twitter.

I write code for games and simulations, covering areas from networking to character interaction. I write tools for artists and designers and help them integrate their art and game behaviors into the finished product.