Ian Cavanaugh

Sales engineer and systems designer working in industrial manufacturing. The job is technical sales: translating customer requirements into fabricated product. What I've built around it is software architecture.

The degree is in Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering from Webb Institute. A ship is among the most tightly integrated systems humans build: structures, fluids, machinery, electrical, and stability all interdependent, all constrained by the same hull. The maritime connections are real, but the discipline transfers. That's how a naval architect ends up building estimating pipelines for HVAC.

I built an estimating pipeline from scratch in a single quarter. Three layers of automation replaced a manual, spreadsheet-driven process: takeoff ingestion, a pricing engine, and a browser-based proposal dashboard running on AWS. Job coverage went from 14% to 56% in the first week it ran. The estimators who use it stopped doing the math and started checking it.

The work I keep returning to: find the process held together with Word documents and institutional memory, then build what should replace it.

I've been writing code long enough to have VBA scars. Currently working toward AWS Solutions Architect certification and building toward a role where the scope is infrastructure rather than individual tools.

Outside of work: Tang Soo Do, 3rd Dan black belt, and BJJ, currently brown belt. The discipline transfers.

This site is where I keep the work that's worth showing.