Michael P. Newman

About

Most recently I led hardware and firmware at SmartBarrel, where I owned a fleet of 1,000+ industrial IoT devices deployed on construction sites — environments that punish anything fragile. My work spanned C++ firmware on microcontrollers, embedded Linux applications on Raspberry Pi, an image capture and processing pipeline, cellular connectivity, secure OTA updates, and custom PCB and enclosure design.

Before embedded systems, I built full-stack web software and led the development of an open-source contract-testing framework. In a previous life I was a tax lawyer at Deloitte — a background that taught me to reason carefully about complex systems and communicate clearly about them.

C/C++ Embedded Linux AVR / ATmega Raspberry Pi OTA Updates Cellular IoT KiCad Autodesk Eagle Autodesk Fusion Go AWS

Experience

Software Engineer – Head of Hardware · SmartBarrel

Nov 2023 – Oct 2025

Owned hardware and firmware for a distributed fleet of 1,000+ connected workforce-management devices, from architecture through manufacturing and launch.
Developed C++ firmware for ATmega microcontrollers and embedded Linux (Raspberry Pi) applications for device control, connectivity, and imaging.
Designed and implemented the device's image pipeline: camera capture under difficult lighting, on-device validation, and reliable upload over intermittent cellular networks.
Built and operated secure over-the-air (OTA) firmware update infrastructure across the fleet.
Designed custom PCBs (KiCad, Autodesk Eagle) — including a hot-swap power multiplexer and LED boards — and mechanical enclosures (Autodesk Fusion), working with a hardware engineer and PCB assembly partner through production.

Software Engineer · Signet (open source)

2023

Created Signet, an open-source framework for spec-driven contract testing of microservices; led a remote team of four engineers.
Implemented a Go CLI that auto-generates service contracts by recording existing service tests, plus single-command provisioning of 24 AWS infrastructure components.

Software Engineer · Freelance

2021 – 2023

Built full-stack web applications: an asynchronous API-execution tool, a real-time webhook development service, and a social discussion platform.

Tax Manager, Washington National Tax · Deloitte

2015 – 2022

National subject-matter expert on cross-border business issues; built data-intensive quantitative models guiding complex transactions.

What I Work With

Embedded

C/C++, bare-metal AVR firmware, embedded Linux, image pipelines on edge devices, OTA updates, cellular connectivity, power management, serial interfaces

Hardware

Schematic capture & PCB design (KiCad, Autodesk Eagle), enclosure design (Autodesk Fusion), component selection, prototyping, manufacturing readiness

Software

Go, TypeScript/JavaScript, Python, Ruby, Node.js, React, PostgreSQL, MongoDB

Tooling & Cloud

Linux, Git, Bash, Docker, CI/CD, AWS (EC2, ECS Fargate, Lambda, CloudFormation)