Avid Technology was my first job out of college and it was an amazing experience.  When I joined the company there was only about 430 employees worldwide.  In the Tewksbury, MA location we only occupied half of the top floor of what is now known as “Building 1”.  Avid was growing at a breakneck pace.  Every day there were 10 new job requisitions posted and the company was the 5th quickest growing company in the western hemisphere.  I was hired as a Software Quality Engineer but I knew next to nothing about software quality back then.  They hired me because I was one of the very few people around at the time who had non-linear audio experience.  After being with the company for 1 week I was asked to be their very first Hardware Quality Engineer.  I helped grow the Hardware Quality team to 7 people in total and became Team Leader of the group.

The Hardware Quality Engineering group was responsible for qualifying every piece of hardware that Avid/Digidesign manufactured including all peripheral boards, storage subsystems and audio interfaces.  We also greatly mapped out the avid system performance and contributed significantly to the improvement of that performance.  An interesting side responsibility was providing the ultimate field operations support for the biggest clients, many of whom were movie stars or Oscar winning editors/directors.  I had a hand in the development cycle of every component hardware (and some software) component that Avid produced.  I was part of a core set of about 30-40 engineers that really made the professional products happen.

During my employment (1994-1999) I was also Avid’s liaison to Apple Computer.  Avid was one of the largest vendors of Apple Computer at the time.  All of Avid’s products were Macintosh based for most of this period.  My role was “Apple Seed Hardware Engineer”.  In this position I was one of 5 people outside Apple that had a direct hand in the testing and development of Apple’s professional lines of computers.  Every high end Mac prototype was sent to me far in advance of release so that I could evaluate performance and compatibility with Avid’s products.  I was heavily involved in all Apple systems from the “Flagship” 8100/110 to the “Sawtooth” G4.

During my time at Avid I was fortunate to learn a great deal from some brilliant, passionate engineers.  I have kept in close contact with many of them, including Scott Glorioso who I founded Tweak Head Technology with in 2005.