eli martinez

Bottom-up career development, I started my career as a technician in the semiconductor fabs scattered throughout the bay area. I learned hands-on how to operate, troubleshoot and maintain CVD, PVD, Wet Etch & Clean equipment. For the first decade of my career, I mainly worked on the epitaxial process, manually operating Applied Materials AMC 7600/7800 reactor systems. Later I transitioned from working at semiconductor fabs to working at semiconductor equipment manufacturers - like Applied Materials. On the equipment side, I worked as a final test technician building, calibrating and testing new and used systems. Later, I moved to process roles, related to single wafer/mask wet etch & clean processes. I began my international systems and process support roles during this time.

Leaving the semiconductor equipment world with an in depth understanding of how the hardware interacts with the process I decided to double-down on my wet process experience. I joined my first startup as a chemical bath deposition process engineer at Solyndra. This was an exciting time for me and gave me the ability to learn the development process from early-stage lab experimentation and follow the product and process through high volume manufacturing startup and qualification stages. Honestly, this was the highlight of my career - working with a great team, and working towards saving the world.

Thirsty for another startup experience, I jumped over to the OLED display sector at the early process development stage. I spent close to a decade of dedicated OLED process development work that ultimately spawned an era of mass-produced OLED displays. Most notably my work directly contributed to the successful product launch of the iPhone X and Galaxy displays - as well as foldable displays like the Galaxy Fold. During my last couple years, I worked on projects that enabled companies throughout Asia to initiate successful QD-TV factories and products.

Wanting to find another impactful project to sink my teeth into, I began researching different industries that I could potentially disrupt with my work ethic, passion and experience. While on this quest, I was tapped to help start up an automation team in the food tech sector. With a mission of filling food deserts and making real foods available for the masses at affordable prices, this fit well with my personal goals of working on impactful - tech related projects. I gained a good understanding of how to transfer knowledge from one industry to another. I also had an opportunity to practice my newly acquired coding superpowers. Spearheading a six-month project, I analyzed the current processes, designed a solution, brought on headcount to develop & implement tools in Python in order to optimize product launch tasks with code.