For Dan Gudino, engineering is equal parts craft, curiosity, and patience. A double E by training, he’s spent years working across the analog-to-RF spectrum—microwave, radio wave, and electromagnetics—before bringing that expertise into test and measurement at Keysight Technologies.
What drew him to Quilter wasn’t just the promise of speed, but the relief of focus: “I like that you can do the critical portion, the placement, and save the time for the engineer.” In Humans in the Loop, Dan represents the thoughtful builder—someone who knows when to zoom in on the trace and when to step back to see the system.
Origins
Dan’s path into electronics started with an early fascination for the invisible forces shaping communication. “My electives were focused on microwave, radio waves, electromagnetics, very high-frequency stuff. That’s what I find fascinating; there’s all kinds of funny stuff that happens there.”
He stayed an extra year in school just to take a year-long sequence on the subject: “I could have graduated a year earlier, but I stayed because of that course.” That choice opened the door to helping Ph.D. students in the lab and seeing how theory met real-world testing. “I got exposed to what industry really goes through versus just academia,” he says—a moment that solidified his love for hands-on learning and experimental problem-solving.
Journeys in Engineering
After earning both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering, Dan worked three years in Silicon Valley before returning to graduate school at USC. “There I had a chance to study analog circuits, RFIC circuits, and mixed-signal circuits,” he says.
Most of his professional life unfolded at Keysight Technologies, where he worked across FPGAs, microwave and millimeter-wave circuits, chip-and-wire integration, and software-defined measurement systems. “We have a huge sandbox to play in,” he recalls. “That’s where I applied most of my knowledge and worked through different departments all the way to Keysight Labs.”
For Dan, circuit design is an act of immersion: “You get very intimate with the layout and schematic. By the time you finish a board, you know it almost from memory.” But he’s equally candid about its limits: “It’s a huge time suck. After a while it becomes repetitive.” That realization planted the seed for what would eventually lead him toward Quilter.
Why Quilter
What drew Dan to Quilter was the company’s mission to make design time matter again. “What I like about Quilter is that you can do the critical portion—the placement—and save time for the engineer.” He sees automation not as a threat but as liberation: a way to preserve the craft while removing the drudgery.
“It solves that huge pain for engineers that after a while is just tedious. You think, I’ve got to do another board, and it’s like, what’s the novelty here?” he says.
Equally important for him is the startup culture: “I always like the idea of a startup because it’s for folks that know what to do, they don’t need supervision. You’re goal-oriented, and it’s less bureaucratic.” He relishes being part of a team where “you’re an entrepreneur inside the company,” focused on collective success rather than hierarchy. “If you’re focused on what you’re doing, you just want to teach each other so you can learn as much as possible and make everybody successful in the end.”
Beyond the Workbench
Outside of engineering, Dan’s curiosity stretches wide, from psychology and marketing to spirituality and history. “I used to stay away from that stuff—psychology, personalities—but now I realize it’s very important,” he says. His current reading stack includes Sapiens, and Chaos.
He’s also grounded in simple pleasures: “You can’t go wrong anywhere in the world with a nice juicy steak, medium rare, a glass of red wine, and some asparagus. And a cigar with whiskey—that’s the perfect triad.”
For fun, he still channels the kid who once bet marbles and spun tops for coins. “Man, we were gamblers since third grade,” he laughs. These days, that competitive energy goes into soccer, the gym, and long nights spent making the startup vision real: “I don’t mind working a lot of hours because I want to make this happen.”
A Line to Remember
“Always stay curious. Always ask questions—even when it’s not engineering. Stay like a kid, even though you’re an adult.”
Closing Note
Dan’s mix of analog rigor and open-ended curiosity embodies what Humans in the Loop celebrates. His story reminds us that innovation thrives not in repetition, but in the restless drive to understand—and improve—what lies beneath the signal.
