Send us Fan Mail 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. degree...
May 08, 2026•53 min•Season 7Ep. 20
Send us Fan Mail 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 abo...
May 01, 2026•54 min•Season 7Ep. 19
Send us Fan Mail 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 o...
Apr 24, 2026•1 hr 2 min•Season 7Ep. 18
Send us Fan Mail 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 C...
Apr 17, 2026•45 min•Season 7Ep. 17
Send us Fan Mail 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 car...
Apr 10, 2026•51 min•Season 7Ep. 15
Send us Fan Mail 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. ...
Apr 03, 2026•43 min•Season 7Ep. 15
Send us Fan Mail 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 ...
Apr 02, 2026•1 min
Send us Fan Mail 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...
Mar 27, 2026•53 min•Season 7Ep. 14
Send us Fan Mail 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 ...
Mar 20, 2026•53 min•Season 7Ep. 13
Send us Fan Mail 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 adj...
Mar 18, 2026•4 min•Season 7Ep. 12
Send us Fan Mail 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 st...
Mar 13, 2026•49 min•Season 7Ep. 11
Send us Fan Mail 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 ...
Mar 10, 2026•3 min
Send us Fan Mail 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...
Mar 06, 2026•56 min•Season 7Ep. 10
Send us Fan Mail 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. Surp...
Feb 27, 2026•58 min•Season 7Ep. 9
Send us Fan Mail 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 al...
Feb 20, 2026•48 min•Season 7Ep. 8
Send us Fan Mail 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...
Feb 13, 2026•58 min•Season 7Ep. 7
Send us Fan Mail 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 ens...
Feb 06, 2026•42 min•Season 7Ep. 6
Send us Fan Mail 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 a...
Jan 30, 2026•38 min•Season 7Ep. 5
Send us Fan Mail 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 robo...
Jan 23, 2026•1 hr•Season 7Ep. 4
Send us Fan Mail 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 wor...
Jan 20, 2026•3 min
Send us Fan Mail 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 helpe...
Jan 16, 2026•55 min•Season 7Ep. 3
Send us Fan Mail 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 r...
Jan 12, 2026•3 min
Send us Fan Mail 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 ...
Jan 09, 2026•1 hr 2 min•Season 7Ep. 1
Send us Fan Mail 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 ...
Jan 02, 2026•49 min•Season 7Ep. 1
Send us Fan Mail 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 managemen...
Dec 26, 2025•52 min•Season 6Ep. 52
Send us Fan Mail 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 th...
Dec 19, 2025•21 min•Season 6Ep. 51
Send us Fan Mail 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 abou...
Dec 12, 2025•56 min•Season 6Ep. 50
Send us Fan Mail 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. W...
Dec 05, 2025•54 min•Season 6Ep. 49
Send us Fan Mail 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 pos...
Nov 28, 2025•47 min•Season 6Ep. 48
Send us Fan Mail 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 th...
Nov 21, 2025•44 min•Season 6Ep. 47
