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, medical devices, and renewable energy. I work with a network of 100+ engineers and 50+ manufacturing partners to take products from a napkin sketch to a production line.

Before going independent, I spent years leading hardware teams on products that had to work in the real world — drones for first responders, systems with FAA filings and DO-254 compliance, things that couldn’t be patched 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 metaphor for writing. Most of the time in engineering, you’re actively driving output. Sometimes it’s worth going Hi-Z — observing, thinking, not forcing a signal.

Also my last name is Mash. High-Z + Mash = highzmash. The electrical engineering pun was too good to pass up.

What this blog is

Mostly opinion pieces on engineering team leadership — how to hire, 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 that went sideways in an interesting way.

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

Get in touch