Tempo Automation

Tempo is the world's fastest low-volume electronics manufacturer, using software-driven automation to deliver complex designs with unprecedented speed, quality and transparency. From rockets to robots, autonomous cars to drones, many of America's fast-moving enterprises are already working with Tempo to optimize for a new level of business advantage.

We believe unimaginable breakthroughs for human progress are possible when we can explore ideas by cycling rapidly between conception and realization. Whether we’re settling the frontiers of outer space, mapping genes for longer lives, shifting the world to clean energy, or prototyping the electronics that make it all possible, the drive toward innovation is an inherent part of our human nature.

That’s why Tempo is here—to take that drive to entirely new levels. By building a more intelligent and intuitive manufacturing system designed to meet the demands of innovation, we’re bringing speed, precision, and transparency where they’ve never been before.

We take pride in facing this challenge with the same kind of deep curiosity, methodical experimentation and fast iterative learning we see in our customers, the engineers we serve.

WHY JOIN US?

1) Big market and great growth — Every company in the world that produces electronics in any form stands to benefit from developing their products with Tempo. The market for electronics prototyping is roughly $230 billion; it contains everything from rocketry and automobiles to thermostats and industrial equipment. This year alone, our revenue has gone up 500%.

2) Positive impact on the world — We will significantly accelerate the progress of multiple industries that affect billions of people every day. Looking for a leveraged way to help humanity and move technology as a whole forward? Here it is.

3) Solving a real pain point — Electrical engineers don't have the luxury of a tight feedback loop. While software engineers tweak their code, run it, and quickly see the results of those changes, electrical engineers usually wait several weeks to receive prototype boards and continue iterating on their designs.

Tempo is fixing that. We know that high-quality circuit boards can be manufactured quickly; we do it every day. But in order to continue to take on more complex customer designs, offer more powerful insights into those designs, build and design new factories, and make everything run smoother and faster, we need sharp software engineers.

TECHNICAL CHALLENGES

1) Providing electrical engineers with the physical equivalent of a fast and correct compiler is extremely difficult, but the payoff is enormous. If we succeed, we accelerate the development of dozens of critical industries. Instead of having hardware engineers sit on their hands for weeks waiting for prototypes, our platform enables rapid self-service that delivers a prototype in days.

In working towards our vision of a seamless and transparent customer experience, we run up against all sorts of obstacles in both software and manufacturing. Here are some problems we've solved so far:

2) CAD Parsing & Feature Extraction: extracting features from a customer's CAD file is one of the first things we have to do to provide a great customer experience, but because much of the data we extract is geometric, this process can be very computationally intense. Parsing is also difficult, since there are many different CAD programs, each typically with its own distinct file format.

3) Automatic Quoting: our supply chain includes multiple vendors with complex pricing schemes, which makes generating detailed quotes for a given circuit board design very difficult. Solving this problem requires great UX as well, since we show customers quotes that are far more detailed (i.e. line-items at the individual component level) than any other manufacturer.

Process Traceability: our factory technicians need to record what they did and when, but doing so on a paper sheet or in Trello is time-consuming and often inaccurate. We've built a tailored mobile workflow management app instead that, as a bonus, gives them context-specific information about the design while they're performing certain manufacturing steps.

We have so many interesting problems ahead, including:

1) Offering real-time, automated manufacturing feedback based on certain parameters of our customers' designs. Think linting for hardware.
2) Optimizing our factory processes with statistics and scheduling algorithms.
3) Encoding the three-dimensional structure of each component (i.e. resistors, capacitors) that we place on customers' boards, to ensure minimal manufacturing defects.
4) Automated optical inspection faster than anyone in the industry.