Chirag Shah

• Serve as Chief of Staff to the CTO, driving alignment across engineering leadership, influencing strategic decision-making, and acting as a force multiplier to scale technical initiatives across the organization.
• Lead a high-performing team of program managers, mentoring and enabling them to deliver complex, cross-functional engineering programs with precision, agility, and executive-level visibility.
• Spearhead 0 → 1 technical programs, guiding ambiguous ideas into structured execution by establishing governance models, defining success metrics, and driving rapid delivery of MVPs and scalable solutions.
• Oversee org-wide engineering programs across multiple business units, aligning roadmaps, managing interdependencies, and ensuring consistent execution against company-level objectives.
• Architect and implement program operating models that scale with growth — including portfolio management practices, reporting cadences, and process frameworks that enable predictable delivery.
• Facilitate cross-functional collaboration between engineering, product, design, and business stakeholders, ensuring alignment and reducing friction in execution of key initiatives.
• Act as a trusted advisor to the CTO and engineering leaders, synthesizing technical and strategic inputs into actionable plans, risk assessments, and communication frameworks for executive stakeholders.
• Lead the annual planning and prioritization process across engineering, establishing investment frameworks and ensuring initiatives align with long-term company strategy.
• Implement change management and process improvement initiatives, reducing delivery risk and increasing engineering velocity through tooling, automation, and operational excellence.
• Champion a culture of accountability, continuous improvement, and data-driven execution, leveraging OKRs, KPIs, and retrospectives to measure and optimize program impact

EPM Lead-Pixel 6/7/8 and Nest:

• Lead program manager for development, test and engaging with health and FDA compliance teams for the first FDA approved phone to demonstrate Body Temperature Sensing as part of Pixel 8 Pro.
• Lead NPI development and readiness closely working with EE/Camera/RF/Display/Sensors teams, actively tracking bugs, issues, HW challenges and escalations to VP/senior management
• Lead several functional/timeline escalations and proactively presented the risks and solutions to meet tight timelines
• Cross-functional lead and go-to for all production/test issues and driving FA discussions with engineering and operations teams
• Leveraged past experience in Factory Automation and led deployment of automated Pixel lines and integrate in-line testing vs offline manual testing leading to opex savings of more than $2mn and streamlined manufacturing
• Lead new CM onboarding including data infrastructure, factory infrastructure and training CMs in CM/JDM model
• Key point of contact for Factory Test deployment engaging in discussions with OPM/SysTPM/PQE/REL teams
• Lead remote deployment of Test Readiness in pandemic and successfully negotiated CM move from CN to Thailand. Experience working with major CMs like Foxconn, Quanta, Chicony
• Managed capex spending for major programs and delivered savings upwards of $300k for multiple programs driving scrappiness in reuse and refurbishing in lieu of of buying new capital equipment.

Product Management:

• Conceptualized and led deployment of Real Time manufacturing OS to gain insights into offshore manufacturing facilities at CMs. Drove cross-functional team buy in and secured resources and funding from VP and senior leadership team.
• Saved 1000+ man hours per month during builds by reducing turnaround time between US and CN teams
• Project recognized by COO for improving efficiency and work life balance

Next Gen Technologies:

• Led concept to deployment of ML/AI based AOI and cosmetic stations at CM factories. Led development discussions with fixture vendors, CMs and Engineering teams
• Led cross-BU discussions with Google Cloud team to develop and deploy the ML algorithms in cloud for ultra fast data delivery

• Model 3 Production Hell to Production Heaven – Led the Gigafactory Manufacturing Test team program management to ramp Model 3 production from a few cars/week to ultimate goal of 5000 cars/week
• Led programs for Model 3 module and pack lines
• Routinely interface with C-suite and VPs for approvals, buy-offs and suggestions for improvements
• Led special projects for yield improvements assigned by VP of technology
• Drove yield improvements on HiPot tests resulting in 16% yield improvement from 83% to 99% resulting in savings of $24,000/day
• Led validation, integration and final deployment for approximately 50 test stations on the module and pack line
• Led data visualization and process improvement with production, quality and data science team to deep dive on failure paretos to further product and process yield to lead Tesla to profitability
• Led Tesla Energy product pipeline for Residential and Industrial products, encompassing 12 unique end applications, leading the worlds transition to sustainable energy
• Led a 72 hr taskforce for factory line overhaul to deliver 5000 cars/week
• Led tester deployments for FAT of new lines developed in Germany
• Issued RFPs and led tester developments with Contract Manufacturers in China and Canada
• Developed test strategies for high volume manufacturing with Contract Manufacturers in China for Tesla’s Energy line
• Tracked project milestones, deliverables and communicated timelines to cross functional teams and upper management
• Performed Operating Equipment Efficiency(OEE) analysis and worked with Supply Chain team to coordinate on-time product delivery
• Developed and deployed 19 module interconnect testers to test the quality of the laser welds
• Led Tester regression and fault injection testing development before deploying testers to the manufacturing line
• Developed and deployed 10 HiPot testers to guarantee safety and reliability of 20000 modules/week.

• Leading an enterprise-wide change in project management from waterfall to agile using JIRA
• Lead the intern recruitment and interview process
• Successfully managed a $200,000 platform conversion project using agile methodology
• Solid deliverable with $22,000 under budget
• Recruited and supervised a four member offshore team
• Work with cross-functional teams to achieve seamless migrations
• Conduct regular meetings to monitor operations and process improvements
• Track the progress using Key Performance Indicators at each phase
• Work with internal stakeholders on a regular basis to gather project requirements, develop detailed plans and establish roadmaps with clear timelines for deliverables
• Work with senior management to identify and prioritize business opportunities
• Expert in managing software and hardware development lifecycle (SDLC and HDLC) and network information security
• Proficient in doing trend assessment and large-scale data analysis with JMP, SPSS(IBM) and SAS E-miner (Oracle)
• Expert in writing SQL queries using MySql and Teradata
• Performed a Customer Lifetime Value analysis for the Channel Marketing team to maximize the profitability of new product campaigns
• Led the New Product Development (NPD) cycle in a fast paced, cross divisional team setting
• Engineered excellence in product Test and Validation (T&V) for software and hardware development
• Actively managed cross-location, cross-functional team meetings for Design for Test (DFT) and Design for Manufacturing (DFM) to minimize test and quality issues
• Developed lab automation using Python PyVisa which reduced the burden of manual data collection by over 200%.