Principal hardware engineer · Mercer Island, WA
I'm Jon Mash. I design and lead hardware programs end to end, PCB to production, with the rigor of someone who has built flight and spacecraft electronics.
Mash Engineering is new, and I'm taking on my first clients. The experience behind it isn't new.
What I do
Five disciplines. I've personally owned every one, on a real program.
Schematic and layout for flight and ground hardware. Power distribution, sensor front ends, and subsystem controllers, plus high-speed and signal-integrity review before a board goes to fab.
Mechanical ownership as part of a fielded hardware product, not a standalone drafting service.
Bare-metal firmware, board support packages, drivers, and comms links, including first-board bring-up, and functionally-safe firmware where the program required it.
Device-side and server software that supports the hardware: monitoring, data presentation, and the path between a device and the system that watches it.
Concept to out-the-door production, not a supplier directory. Currently own a product line from initial concept through production and into customer support.
I'm one engineer, so the list of what I don't do matters as much as the list of what I do.
I don't do FEA or detailed thermal analysis as a standalone service - my mechanical work has always been inside a product I owned end to end, not a drafting job I took in isolation.
And I'm not a certification house. I've designed hardware inside programs that had to satisfy aerospace process requirements, but Mash Engineering itself holds no DO-254 artifacts, no UL listing, no IP rating, and no ISO certification. If your project needs any of that, I'll tell you at the first email rather than the third invoice.
Programs I've owned
Director of Hardware · 2023–present
Own all hardware for the company's products: Electrical, Mechanical, and Test, across drones and ground support equipment, from initial concept through out-the-door production and customer support. Grew the engineering team from under 5 to 40+ over 3.5 years.
Hardware Development Manager, Avionics and Endpoints · 2020–2023
Satellite flight computer, vehicle comms bus, magnetometer, sun sensor, magnetorquers, propulsion control unit, solar array deployment unit. Recruited and managed 14+ EE, systems, and SI/PI engineers. Owned a multi-million-dollar development budget.
A satellite constellation needs a flight computer and a set of bus endpoints: the attitude sensors, the actuators, the deployment and propulsion control hardware, that all speak one vehicle-wide communication bus. Every one of them has to be architected, specified, built, tested, and qualified before the vehicle flies.
I led and managed the Avionics and Bus Endpoints team. I owned the hardware for the flight computer, the vehicle-wide communication bus, the magnetometer, the sun sensor, the magnetorquers, the propulsion control unit, the solar array deployment unit, and the cameras.
Every phase of the hardware design on the subsystems I owned: architecture, requirements, development, testing, and qualification. A multi-million dollar development budget. And the interfaces between design engineering and the systems, reliability, hardware test, and manufacturing engineering teams.
One owner, a dozen distinct subsystems, each with its own requirements set, test campaign, and qualification evidence, all converging on a single bus and a single schedule. I also had to build the team that did it: I recruited, trained, and managed a cross-functional group of more than fourteen engineers.
Source: jonmash/resume → experience.tex, Amazon Project Kuiper entry.
Hardware Development Engineer → Sr. Hardware Development Engineer → Hardware Development Manager · 2016–2020
Started on firmware for the Flight Termination System: deterministic state machines, fail-safe design, built-in self-test. Moved into hardware: sensors, magnetometers, IMUs, and the avionics power system. Co-owned flight computer design, including redundant power. Also owned Altium ECAD administration and the design standards the engineering org worked to.
Lead Product Developer · 2010–2016
Early-career firmware and PCB design. Led PCB design and manufacturing support for the product's communication gateway, including wireless (Zigbee/Wi-Fi) design, plus the IoT device and server software that presented customer data.
Microinverters sit on a roof, one per panel, and they have to report back. The one communication medium guaranteed to reach all of them is the power line they are already connected to, which is also one of the noisiest channels you can pick. On top of that, somebody has to monitor and control whole fleets of them once they are installed.
I was the lead product developer, and I grew the group from just me to a team of six engineers and developers that I recruited and trained. I developed a power line communication protocol using forward error correcting codes for robust communication with the microinverters. I built an in-house embedded Linux device using Zigbee communication, USB, 802.11 WiFi, and a WebSocket API to cloud servers, and an AWS-based monitoring and control product on top of it using web technologies.
The entire hardware process: component selection, PCB design, mechanical design, prototyping, and testing, plus the manufacturing, assembly, and testing procedures that delivered quality product to customers. Above that: market research, feature requirements derivation, and product requirements specifications. I led and supported field trial deployments at sites across North America.
One person had to hold the market requirements, a communication protocol, an embedded Linux product, a cloud service, and a manufacturing process in the same head, because there was no one else to hold them. And field trials are the honest test: hardware that works on the bench has to work on roofs across a continent, installed by people you will never meet, on power lines you cannot characterize in advance.
Source: jonmash/resume → otherexperience.tex, SPARQ Systems entry.
Mash Engineering is new. The work isn't: everything above is something I've personally owned, just inside someone else's company. What's new is doing it under my own name.
That means one practical thing for you: you talk to the engineer doing the work, every time; there's nobody here to route you to.
Send me what you're working on and what's hard about it. I'll tell you whether it's something I can do. If it isn't, I'll say so. I'd rather decline early than scope something I'll hand back.
Tell me what you're building and what's hard about it. I read every message myself.