About

I’m Jon Mash — a hardware engineer with a career built at the intersection of complex systems and the teams that build them.

I run Mash Engineering LLC, a turnkey hardware engineering consultancy based in Washington state. We handle the full spectrum — mechanical design, electrical engineering, and embedded software — across aerospace, public safety, renewable energy and others. I work with a network of 50+ engineers and 30+ manufacturing partners to take products from a napkin sketch to a production line.

By day, I’m the Director of Engineering at BRINC Drones — a company building autonomous drones for law enforcement and first responders, purpose-built for the kinds of situations where sending a human in first isn’t the right call.

Before that, I spent years leading hardware teams on products that had to work in the real world — rugged satellite systems for Amazon’s Kuiper (Leo) programme and high-reliability hardware for Amazon Prime Air. Things that couldn’t be fixed with a software update after shipping.

Why “High-Z”?

In electrical engineering, High Impedance (Hi-Z) describes a state where a circuit node is effectively disconnected — not actively driven high or low, just… present. It’s a state of observation, not assertion. There’s something I like about that as a metaphor for writing — sometimes it’s worth going Hi-Z instead of always driving output.

Also, it just sounded cool. And my last name is Mash — High-Z + Mash = highzmash. The electrical engineering pun sealed the deal.

What this blog is

Mostly opinion pieces on engineering team leadership — how to hire, how to effectively manage a high performance engineering team, how to run design reviews, how to ship hardware on a schedule that’s already slipping, why your DFM process is probably broken, that kind of thing.

Occasionally I’ll document a side project or homelabbing experiment. The ones that went sideways make for the best stories.

I write from experience, not theory. If something I say is wrong, I want to hear about it.

Get in touch