Drew Applegath

Translate client needs and requirements into architecture and design specifications for healthcare technology solutions.

• Own and manage the full pipeline of client change requests, features, and integrations for our Clinical Trial Management System (CTMS)
• Work across Workbench, our internal enterprise platform, to surface clinical-trial and other datasets — driving big-data analytics and actionable insights

Managed the software engineering group within Digital Solutions, owning a mission-critical heads-up application used daily by ~2,000 engineers — and by leadership from the fab president on down — to monitor real-time fab health. The system surfaced key metrics such as DPML (days per masking layer) and daily moves, and was relied on across the 3,000-person site, with uptime treated as non-negotiable. Reported directly to a director.

• Partnered with department directors and managers to improve yield, efficiency, and throughput (moves), reduce cost, and relieve bottleneck tool performance
• Led the release of an internal, on-prem LLM
• Shifted the team's focus from one-off reports to reusable tools that made engineers across SAS more productive
• Onboarded and trained every new hire on the cloud platform, Python scripting, and working with the new AI tooling; mentored and managed multiple interns
• Owned a C# / SQL Server stack on on-prem infrastructure, maintaining multiple servers and load balancers
• Migrated the team to fully automated CI/CD via GitLab pipelines
• Built the team's first automated uptime alerting (Grafana + Prometheus) delivered through the company's internal messaging system, enabling remote troubleshooting from the fab floor

• Supported the Process Integration Engineering (PIE) team and the internal manufacturing software engineering group as a solutions engineer
• Partnered with internal fab stakeholders to gather requirements, author scopes of work, and translate business needs into efficient technical changes
• Prioritized and delivered enhancements to manufacturing reports and tooling alongside the engineering teams

Alongside both roles, developed and delivered scheduled, audited lectures as an internal technical trainer at SAS.

• Taught a required onboarding course for every new hire on using our proprietary internal cloud and internal LLM tool
• Led "Advanced Python and Web Apps," a more advanced course covering FastAPI and Python — teaching engineers how to turn data coming off the manufacturing line into actionable insights

Pitched and built out 24G's client-facing solutions engineering function, serving as the sole solutions engineer across an 8–10 person account-management team.

• Ran 2–3 client meetings per day to scope needs and translate them into deliverable work
• Turned around scopes of work — with cost and budget estimates — within a single day
• Partnered with internal development and engineering teams to ensure delivered work matched client requirements
• Continued to handle incoming hardware work as the only person at the ~100-person company with that skill set

Built and supported the hardware and software behind live, interactive trade-show activations — anything involving motors, lighting, or people physically interacting with an experience.

• Stood up local servers to host web content and built touchscreen web tooling for interactive trade-show events
• Buick T-shirt-gun activation: sourced parts and designed a custom housing for a motorized gimbal, wired its input to a microcontroller, and fed it as HID keyboard input into a Unity game built by another team member
• Convinced ownership to bring PCB design in-house; for a reflex speed game (lit buttons + touchscreen), designed a custom PCB, assembled and wired the NeoPixel lighting, and wrote the controlling firmware
• Built that controller as a plug-and-play module — any device can treat the microcontroller as a standard serial device, sending button/light commands and receiving button presses back, making custom front-ends trivial to build on top
• Used 3D modeling and printing to design and fabricate custom enclosures that housed the PCBs I built, integrating the electronics into clean, purpose-built hardware
• Delivered lighting and interactive controls on-site at 50–70 trade-show events, including CES, Google I/O, and AWS

Built training modules and dealership training tools for automobile brands, earning an early on-site co-op.

• Rebuilt the controls for the company's office bowling alley from scratch using a Raspberry Pi with AC motor control
• Added a Raspberry Pi camera running custom OpenCV Python software to detect which pins were standing
• Built the proof of concept for the scoring UI and the "who's up" tablet display, then directed other interns on the front-end build
• System is still in daily use roughly 10 years later

• President and Team Captain of the Michigan Tech Men's Lacrosse Club, helping lead a 25–35 player roster
• Member of Mount Ripley Ski Patrol, the university's associated ski hill — and still patrolling today
• Undergraduate researcher for Dr. Rebecca G. Ong (see Experience)
• Peer mentor and tutor supporting incoming students