Career highlights

Joseph Dattilo

Engineering Manager · Director of Engineering · Lansing, Michigan

Engineering leader and hands-on architect with 20+ years across software, hardware, and operations. Ran an 18-member cross-functional program at 100% on-time delivery across 25 releases; served as Acting Director of Engineering for 12+ distributed developers through an Agile and cloud transition, reconciling 3,000+ tickets of backlog; trained 40+ engineers, developers, and writers. Today operates a production fleet of AI coding agents and authors the tooling that makes mixed human + AI teams safe, the FleetHarbor suite.

This page is a selection, not the full resume. Twenty-plus years across hardware, software, AI, and operations don't fit on one page, and I don't think they should. The complete year-by-year record, with a source for every number, is on the track record page. When I apply somewhere, I send a resume built for that role, not this one — if you're hiring, ask for yours.

Professional experience

• 2011–present

  Founder & Engineer, Date Palm Media LLC (formerly Virtuabotix LLC) — Lansing, MI

  • Have run Date Palm Media's DevOps since the company's founding in February 2017: hosting, deployment pipelines, credentials, and production operations for every site and product the company has shipped.
  • Have run program and project management for every Date Palm Media engagement since 2017: scope, schedules, releases, vendors, and client communication, alongside the engineering.
  • Authored and operate the FleetHarbor suite (RepoHarbor, TaskHarbor, FleetHarbor, NeuroHarbor), tooling for teams where humans and AI agents share repos, boards, and fleets; every product is built by the agent fleet the suite manages.
• 2020–present

  Co-Founder, MyPaintBuckets LLC (remote)

  • Co-founded and run the system of record for new-residential painting operations, project details, material ordering, extra-paint-order capture, scheduling, invoicing; mature software with paying customers.
  • Used the product as the proving ground for the agent fleet: production releases, API test suites, regression suite, and mobile app shipped through the same fleet discipline.
  • Interviewed as co-founder on The Veterans Who Build Show (ep. 8, June 2024); panelist, ConTech: Build vs. Buy (LinkedIn Live, Oct 2024).
• 2018–2024

  Co-Founder, Speak Technologies

  • Co-founded a nine-person distributed team building a platform that placed, transcribed, and analyzed voice communication at scale (product: Albi by Speak).
  • Shipped production NLP before LLMs, sentence classification and named-entity recognition on real call traffic.
  • Owned the full stack: backend, frontend, call recording, invite handling, and Jenkins CI.
• 2017–2018

  Acting Director of Engineering, Greater Giving (Global Payments) — Beaverton, OR

  • Led 12+ geographically distributed developers through an Agile and cloud transition.
  • Reconciled four years of backlog, 3,000+ tickets, across 16 projects and 8 products.
  • Delivered fundraising and event-payments software inside a payments company.
• 2016–2017

  Program Manager, Rigado LLC — Portland, OR

  • Ran an 18-member cross-functional distributed team (EE, ME, firmware, software, mobile, technical writing).
  • Delivered 25 releases at 100% on-time, including iOS/Android SDKs, telemetry releases, and new module hardware.
  • Managed the partner developer program, 14 projects delivered (how-to guides, helper software, SDK releases for a partner's then-unreleased product). Never name the partner.

Earlier roles

Full careers don't start at the highlight reel. Compressed here to one line each — the track record page has the rest.

• 2014–2016

  Senior Software Engineer, Dell (Fluid Cache team, via Experis)

  Built the Django/Python distributed test platform for Dell Fluid Cache, distributed test execution (AE2), cluster registry, log collection, live datacenter build monitoring, replacing manual QA data aggregation org-wide.

• 2011–2012

  Test Engineer, Ramtron International

  Wrote semiconductor test programs taking 12 FRAM and RF/RFID devices through qualification on Nextest Maverick/Magnum platforms.

• 2005–2011

  Staff Sergeant, Space Operations, United States Air Force

  Space Console Operator on the Upgraded Early Warning Radar (UEWR) missile-defense system, with official permission to develop software alongside the operator job.

• 2003

  Manufacturing Line Lead, GE Interlogix (via Volt)

  Led a 12-person advanced circuit-manufacturing team (wave soldering, fine-pitch surface-mount).

Selected proofs

Education

• B.S., Electrical Engineering — Colorado Technical University
• A.A.S., Space Operations Technology — Community College of the Air Force

Full career detail, with sources for every number, is on the track record page. Thinking about hiring me? See what I'm looking for.

Want the full picture?

This career is too long and too varied to hand you as one document and call it done. Tell me the role and I'll send a resume built for it.