AMP Innovation & Technology Culture

What’s one key communication habit you’ve developed and encouraged among your team? 

One communication habit that I encourage on my team is regularly seeking and sharing feedback or advice on projects. This generally looks like a request for input from the team in a Slack message or standup or sharing a design proposal that the rest of the team can respond to with suggestions. This can occur during a project design phase, when you encounter an obstacle or when you’re kicking around an idea that you’d like to expand upon.

Why is this an important habit to cultivate, and what effect has it had on the way your team works and collaborates?

My hope is that regularly receiving and sharing feedback creates an environment in which the team feels supported. Being open to feedback allows you to gather entirely different perspectives on your problem and ensures that your blind spots are mitigated. Regularly sharing feedback allows your ideas and expertise to help others. 

I love watching my team collaborate on projects and evaluate new ideas together. It ends up building more excitement in each individual’s projects when others on the team engage with new elements or help iron out areas that were unclean. Sometimes, engineering projects can be isolating, but it seems to help when you feel like others care about what you’re working on and want to make sure you succeed. 

What advice do you have for other engineering managers who are looking to create healthy communication habits among their teams?

Strong communication habits come from safe environments. Try to find ways to make each member of your team know that you value and support them. Your team deserves to feel like their contributions are impactful and that you will have their back. When you have a foundation of trust and a culture of openness and security, healthy communication develops more naturally.

Seeking feedback from your team on projects is especially key for a manager. If you’re developing processes for your team, you need to get their feedback because it’s the only way to ensure you’re building something that will work for them. Every week, someone from my team sheds light on a way of looking at a problem I hadn’t considered. Listening to your team’s feedback will make you a stronger manager and enhance every project and process you work on.

What types of products or services does your engineering team work on/create? What problem are you solving for customers?

I work on AMP’s data platform team, and our core product is the data infrastructure around our sortation facilities. We create reliable, well-documented and high-quality data pipelines and datasets. The fundamental problem we solve is data chaos. We ingest raw, traditionally siloed information from dozens of sources and transform it into a cohesive “single source of truth.” This empowers our internal customers to make confident, data-driven decisions without questioning the validity of the underlying information.

Tell us about a recent project where your team used AI as a tool. What was it meant to accomplish? How did you use AI to assist?

We needed to automate the processing of a critical vendor file used for mass balancing our recycling facilities. This data arrives via email in an esoteric, non-standard format that previously required manual conversion and transformation before it could be used. As an analytics engineer with more experience in data transformation/analysis than Python development, I used AI as a development partner to build an API that would receive the email and handle all the steps required to load it into our data warehouse. After providing a basic overview of what I needed, I received a well-documented and test-supported API that was ready for cloud deployment after some minimal additional development. Our LLM-assisted coding tools made the whole process very straightforward.

What would that project have looked like if you didn’t have AI as a tool to use? How has AI changed the way you work, in general?

Without AI, the project’s timeline would have easily doubled. Starting a project outside my core expertise like this one would have required much more ramp-up time and additional assistance from a more experienced Python developer. In general, AI has changed my workflow by collapsing the time it takes to get started on basic microservices like this one. Additionally, it handles boilerplate code and model documentation in the blink of an eye, allowing me to focus mental energy on understanding our business logic and developing novel metric tooling.

Describe a typical day with AMP. What sorts of problems are you working on? What tools or methodologies do you employ to do your job?

At AMP, we’re constantly building and training new AI models to handle the unique material streams our customers process, ensuring we extract as much value as possible. My work directly supports our data team by providing the training data and metrics needed to ensure we deploy the most accurate models for each material. I also collaborate with the modeling team, equipping them with the tools they need to innovate and advance our AI capabilities to the next level. 

Each day brings a new challenge, whether it’s refactoring a data pipeline to balance cost and performance, building tools to understand AI model differences or implementing performance checks to ensure our AI doesn’t confuse cleats on conveyor belts with recyclable plastic. When it comes to tools and methodologies, I want to emphasize the importance of customer interviews and having an established design process. These conversations consistently reveal insights that challenge assumptions, clarify goals and keep us aligned with user needs, ensuring we deliver solutions that truly make an impact.

Share a project you’ve worked on that you’re particularly proud of. What was the process like start to finish, and what impact did this project have on the business?

One project I’m especially proud of is the model registry I built, designed to organize over 22,000 trained models, making it easier for users across the company to access key information. When I first arrived, I noticed it was difficult to find details like why a model was trained, its data sources, performance metrics or even who trained it. Though not technically complex, the project required integrating many aspects of our data engine to make this information accessible and actionable.

I started by gathering user stories, which led to a build-versus-buy analysis. Ultimately, I built the registry in-house. The registry helps users easily find models, see how they were trained, check how well they performed and track their results on important tasks, like distinguishing between different types of plastic.

Recently, I’ve been working on giving users the ability to fine-tune models for a specific task directly through the registry. It’s a project that keeps giving, helping us optimize our workflows and model training processes long after its initial implementation.

How do you stay updated with the latest advancements in machine learning, and how do you apply them to your work?

Staying updated with the latest advancements in machine learning is a critical part of my role, and I’ve developed a few methods that help me keep pace with the rapid developments in the field. The biggest piece of advice I have is trying to figure out how to incorporate it into a natural part of your daily work.

One of my favorite ways to stay updated is through our journal clubs at AMP. The modeling team take turns sharing interesting journal articles and comparing them to our own practices. These discussions are incredibly valuable, and we’ve seen several concepts from these sessions make it onto our roadmap to experiment with. 

As much as I can, I try to offload the job of staying informed by simply curating my newsfeed algorithms. Google, Feedly and different newsletters surface relevant news, research papers and tools that I can check out when I have the urge to doom-scroll. 

Finally, whenever we need to evaluate solutions for a particular challenge, I use it as an opportunity to see what's out there, read up on the latest tools and frameworks, and skim through sites like Reddit to gauge user experiences and get a sense of how people are tackling similar challenges.

What project are you most excited to work on in 2025, and what is particularly compelling about this work for you?

I’m excited for the redesign of our facility software UI, which will shift the user focus from engineers to our production operators. I enjoy contributing to work that centers on improving the end user’s experience. Our original UI has sufficed for a smaller user pool, but as we scale and grow, we need these UI improvements to allow for production operators to be more efficient in their roles. The new UI will put the information that’s most important to operators in focus. This allows for faster responses to plant happenings and easier decision-making to meet our throughput goals. Knowing that my work in validation and testing of this UI will contribute to AMP’s strategy of delivering durable diversion technologies is quite rewarding.

What does the roadmap for this project look like? Who will you collaborate with, and what challenges will you need to overcome in the process?

The project is currently split into two phases over the first half of the year. The goal is to verify UI in the field for a significant period prior to bringing online our new facility in Denver with Waste Connections. I’ll collaborate with developers on the facility software team and individuals in the operations organization. Cross-functional communications can prove challenging given different preferences in methods of communication and expectations. Additionally, the amount of change will make testing more complex than it is for individual features and fixes. 

For communication challenges, I envision we’ll increase communications as redesign phases come ready for test. We’ll want to ensure that the right audience receives feedback from our end users and reports of any anomalies in testing to allow for swift resolution of any issues and keep the project on track. For testing challenges, working more closely with development to understand changes and their far-reaching effects will be key. This can include asking for demos and collaborating to write test cases to effectively exercise the changes made.

What in your past projects, education or work history best prepares you to tackle this project? What do you hope to learn from this work to apply in the future?

My original foray into software testing almost 13 years ago was heavily UI-based for the software tools used in field programmable gate arrays/system-on-a-chip design. To effectively test, I needed to pull from past experience in technical support to understand users’ stories and identify how to help steer the software for the best user experience. This “step-into-their-shoes” method will be most beneficial as I keep the end user top of mind during test and validation of the new UI. My testing will yield much insight into what information is critical to operators and how they tend to use our software. This will help me create more effective test cases as we build out new features and tools in our software and provide better, more constructive feedback to my development team on features that affect plant operations.

What practices does your team employ to foster innovation, and how have these practices led to more creative, out-of-the-box thinking?

Automated sortation of trash is a really hard problem with real-world dynamics and issues. The engineering team at AMP has a trash sorting laboratory in Colorado, where we can use actual waste material for testing and innovation. With this ability, we encourage our teams to “get their hands dirty” and explore new innovations by testing and prototyping in the lab, and if they have merit, bring them into the real world and implement them into one of our production sorting facilities. 

Moreover, seeing problems firsthand and getting into the field has yielded many new innovations. We have all of our engineers visit one of our production sorting facilities in Ohio or Virginia. After a visit, the team returns with many ideas about how to improve our systems and gets to work putting those learnings into code or computer-aided design and then quickly implemented into our lab for testing.

How has a focus on innovation increased the quality of your team’s work?

Both the software and hardware teams are constantly improving our sorting efficiency by brainstorming hypotheses, testing them and then rolling those innovations into production. We’ve seen quarterly increases in sort efficiency at our production recycling facilities between 3 and 5 percent. We have also spun out new products, like the AMP MicroJet, Delta-C and the AMP VAC, by being present in these environments and coming up with solutions to real-world problems.

How has a focus on innovation bolstered your team’s culture?

Working alongside and interacting with the production operators who spend all day in the plants has heightened AMP’s culture. Solving hard problems together strengthens the bond between engineering and operations and creates some great experiences that are impossible to duplicate outside of running materials recovery facilities.