CHRISTOPHER KROLAK

Savage, Minnesota, ***** 612-***-****

adjms3@r.postjobfree.com linkedin.com/in/christopher-krolak

ENGINEERING DIRECTOR and TECHNOLOGY MANAGER

High integrity, accomplished leader with a proven track record of developing high performing teams while providing technical subject matter expertise. Engineering director with extensive experience in product R&D, product development, product assurance, test technology development, software development, product launch, and high-volume manufacturing. Areas of expertise:

Engineering management experience of 50+ exempt and non-exempt direct reports from diverse backgrounds across 5 countries.

Certified 6 Sigma Black Belt with mentoring experience as a Master Black Belt as well.

Significant Far East production transfer and liaison experience.

Proficient in data mining and data analysis (SQL, JMP, Minitab, Matlab, Octave).

Practical experience in several programming languages (Python, C++, Java, HTML, JS, etc.).

Practical experience and training in software development life cycle (SDLC), test development best practices and methodologies, including Agile / Scrum, test-driven development (TDD), scrum master (SM), product owner (PO), and continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD).

Ability to balance quality initiatives with time to market demands to deliver high quality and on time.

Passion to provide hands-on creative technical contributions as well as strategic leadership.

Effective communicator to all levels of the organization.

EXPERIENCE

SEAGATE TECHNOLOGY

Director - Software Development, Disk Drive Reliability Engineering, 9/2015 – 12/2020

Lead international software development teams for reliability test software and hardware development. Individual contributions as a department head, product owner, and DevOps lead.

Successfully implemented Agile scrum, test-driven development, and continuous integration processes across a multi-national test development team to achieve 4x improvement in software delivery and quality.

Successfully migrated internal reliability test platform from 32-bit to 64-bit architecture on time and with no significant end user issues.

Integrated key OEM test hardware into Seagate internal test process to provide a joint qualification process which reduced time to qualification by 3 months, overcoming significant test capability deficiencies.

Sr. Manager - Software Development, Disk Drive Reliability Engineering, 06/2012 – 9/2015

Lead a software and test development team for reliability test software and hardware development. Individual contributions as a scrum master, product owner, developer, and validation engineer.

Successfully migrated the reliability test platform to achieve tool and process commonality across multiple sites, despite significant end user resistance and tool capability differences.

Successfully re-staffed and developed multiple test development teams from the ground up to become a center of excellence within 2 years, despite being new to the division.

Designed a DevOps monitoring process and analytics used to manage the test development process, including work prioritization process and Agile metrics.

Sr. Engineering Manager - Test Technology and Process Qualification, 12/2003 – 07/2012

Lead a team of engineers and technicians responsible for assembly, qualification, maintenance, and troubleshooting of new test technology, collaborating with design engineers and manufacturing to provide pre-production test capability.

Developed and matured an R&D test process to increase test capacity from 10s of components per day to 100s of components per day, which required significant technology learning and innovation.

Improved component reliability test capability by redesigning an R&D reliability process to work in a production environment, increasing capacity by 5x in the process.

ADDITIONAL RELEVANT EXPERIENCE

SEAGATE TECHNOLOGY, Bloomington, MN and Shakopee, MN

Six Sigma Black Belt - Head Gimbal Assembly Process Engineering

Test Equipment Support Engineer - Head Gimbal Assembly Prototype Lab

Product Continuation Engineer - Enterprise Hard Disk Drive Recording Heads

Engineering Intern - Industrial Process Controls - Minco Products, Inc.

Engineering Intern - Blood Flow Monitoring R&D - Medtronic

EDUCATION

Master of Science (MS), MOT, Management of Technology, University of Minnesota

Bachelor of Science (BSEE), Electrical Engineering, University of Minnesota

LICENSES & CERTIFICATIONS

Certified Six Sigma Black Belt - Seagate Technology, 2002

SKILLS

Leadership: engineering management, cross-functional team leadership, international team management, mentoring, remote team leadership, collaboration, team building

Project Management: product development, process improvement, project management, product management, technology forecasting, technology roadmaps, product roadmaps, SWOT analysis, quality management, lean methodologies, MS Project, Smartsheets, 8D

Engineering / Technical: Six Sigma Black Belt, continuous improvement, KT problem solving and decision analysis, electrical engineering, systems engineering, data analytics, JMP, Minitab, Competitive Analysis, strong attention to detail, networking, IoT, machine learning

Software Development: Agile methodologies, software development, software engineering, software development life cycle (SDLC), scrum master, product owner, algorithm design, testing, continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD), Git, test-driven development, C++, Python, Java, HTML/CSS, JavaScript, SQL, Linux, cloud computing

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