Daniel Suhr

Senior Software Engineer | Engineering Leader | ML & DevOps Enthusiast

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Summary

Experienced software engineer with a bias for action and a focus on delivering measurable value to both internal and external customers. Clear and effective communicator who views leadership as a continuous, collaborative activity.

Experience

January 2025 - Present

Staff Software Engineer

  • Built an LLM-powered chatbot using RAG best practices to answer questions about AUTOSAR standards documentation. Leveraged Elastic vector databases, LangChain, Chainlit, and GCP Cloud Run to deploy the application broadly across development and architecture teams.
  • Collaborated with the architecture team in Brazil to build a Jira issue debugger using Atlassian APIs, Elastic, and LangChain to accelerate root cause analysis of automotive test issues.
June 2024 - December 2024

Staff Software Engineer

Software development lead of internal tools for vehicle performance & latency analysis

  • Architected a FastAPI backend and a Next.js frontend application for platform, feature, and system engineers to experiment with low-level changes and estimate impact on vehicle performance and latency.
  • Enabled automated deployment of GCP Cloud Run services with Entra ID authentication using GCP Cloud Build.
  • Coached junior engineers on problem-solving approaches, software development paradigms, and best practices.
November 2022 - June 2024

Software Systems Development Engineer

Automation lead for organization of 100+ vehicle systems engineers

  • Led and mentored a team of five software engineers that collaborated with other development teams to define end-to-end automation workflows and introduce automotive engineers to software development practices.
  • Collaborated with the architecture tools team to implement a Python CLI tool replacing a legacy vendor-sourced toolchain, saving Ford over $1 million and enabling programmatic testing of an AUTOSAR-compliant vehicle architecture.
  • Architected CI/CD workflows for critical vehicle deliverables using GitHub Actions.
  • Coached teams on software, tooling, workflow, and design best practices for streamlined value delivery.
  • Facilitated software development training courses in Python (Clean Code, SOLID Principles).
  • Designed and implemented developer workflows for a custom automotive Linux distribution using Yocto and Bitbake.
  • Deployed and managed infrastructure in GCP using Terraform.
  • Implemented observability for internal tools using the Elastic Stack to improve debugging and track version usage across teams.
January 2022 - November 2022

DevOps Engineer

Automation tools lead

  • Designed and implemented automation workflows for an instruction-level simulation tool to foster a shift-left culture and enforce code quality standards.
  • Managed bare-metal high-performance compute infrastructure for vehicle embedded software simulations using Ansible.
April 2021 - November 2021

Site Reliability Engineer

Constructed a new AWS environment while maintaining an existing environment without access to historical documentation or tribal knowledge.

  • Reverse-engineered infrastructure state across multiple AWS accounts to ensure continuity and secure migration.
May 2018 - March 2021

Senior Software Engineer

Tech lead for SAFe System Team responsible for software delivery pipeline health

  • Spearheaded efforts to collect, display, and improve decision-making with DORA DevOps Metrics (change failure rate, lead time, mean time to recovery, and deployment frequency).
  • Improved stability of a Jenkins pipeline for a custom Gentoo Linux distribution, enabling daily builds and release-on-demand.
  • Fulfilled SAFe Product Owner responsibilities: maintained backlog, defined features/stories/bugs, and collaborated with architects and product managers to expand automation capabilities.
March 2017 - May 2018

Software Developer in Test

Test automation engineer and Agile ceremony facilitator

  • Wrote automated tests for low-level network and SSD platform capabilities using Python and Bash.
  • Converted manually documented test cases into Python for streamlined regression testing.
  • Collaborated with teams in India to build test services, simplifying and sharing qualification tests with vendors and partners.
  • Facilitated daily stand-ups, retrospectives, and planning meetings as a SAFe Scrum Master.
October 2015 - March 2017

Hardware Reliability Engineer

Failure analysis and field reliability engineer

  • Performed first-level failure analysis of defective rack servers.
  • Tracked systemic failure rates and collaborated with vendors on escalations.
  • Automated generation of failure rate reports using Python, enabling identification and remediation of faulty SSD batches.
October 2015 - March 2017

Customer Quality Failure Analysis Engineer

Performed detailed failure analysis of spinning disk drives

Education

Colorado School of Mines

Bachelor Electrical Engineering