As Principal Systems Engineer at SharkNinja, I led controls and algorithm development for the Ninja Luxe Café flagship coffee system, shipping the algorithms below from prototype through mass production.

Algorithms delivered

• Barista Assist Technology — guided brewing based on grind quality, pressure profiling, and flow curves
• Milk Froth Control — multi-stage temperature and flow control for consistent milk texture
• Temperature Control — thermal regulation across all brewing modes
• PID for Espresso — control loop with thermal compensation for consistent espresso extraction
• Error / Fault Detection — embedded fault detection and monitoring
• Signal Processing — sensor fusion and filtering

Development lifecycle

• Prototyping — commercial sensors and motor drivers integrated into working prototypes
• System flow definition — feature-level state flows specified in collaboration with embedded software engineers
• Testing and documentation — testing code in C++, Arduino, Python, and MATLAB
• Risk management — identified failure modes, defined error states, shipped safe-state fallback logic
• Test tooling — Python applications and an R-Pi / Arduino apparatus for hardware-in-the-loop testing

Patents (Granted)

• Preventing coffee bean grinder jamming (US12369741B1)
• Preparation of beverage machines for cold beverage brewing (US12369744B1)
• Zero retention coffee bean hopper (US12514394B2)
• Suggesting coffee bean grind size for beverage machines (US20250235034A1)

Patents (Pending / Under Review)

• Queueing beverage machine preparations (WO2025155327A1)
• Descaling beverage machines (US20250235041A1)
• Zero retention coffee bean hopper (continuation) (US20250275644A1)