Take it apart, then figure it out
The long way to Pontem
I trace my roots back to Sidhwan Khurd, a small village of about a thousand people in Punjab, India. My path into engineering really started the day I figured out I’d rather take things apart than play with them as intended - most of my toys ended up dissected with a brick; long before I could handle a screwdriver, much less put them back together. That instinct, to figure out how things actually work, has shaped pretty much everything I’ve done since.
Fun fact: I did my kindergarten, middle school, and high school all in the same village, and grew up in a joint family of thirteen. There’s a particular kind of patience you learn early in a household that big - and a particular kind of stubbornness too.
Sidhwan Khurd - where it all started.
Education
I moved to Canada for graduate school at the University of Waterloo, where I picked up a Master’s in Mechatronics and Mechanical Engineering with a focus on Data Analytics and Green Energy, alongside a Graduate Diploma in Business Intelligence and Entrepreneurship.
Fun fact: Mechatronics is the field that lets you call yourself a mechanical, electrical, and software engineer in the same sentence - depending on which part of the project is currently on fire. It also gave me an unhealthy enthusiasm for soldering irons and a genuine love for problems that sit at the intersection of physical assets and digital tools.
Career Journey So Far…
My career kicked off in 2020 at LG Electronics in India, where I spent six months as an R&D co-op debugging PCBs, analyzing field failures, and chasing lean manufacturing wins wherever I could find them.
I then took on an internship with RealBotics, a Pittsburgh-based startup, where I led design of an IoT project full mechanical design in Fusion 360, a Python and Raspberry Pi software stack, and through-hole PCB layout for production. The kind of project where one day you’re CAD-ing, the next you’re soldering, and the next you’re explaining to non-technical stakeholders why version 7 looked nothing like version 1. A useful lesson in iterating quickly.
After Waterloo I joined Wood in 2023 as a Digital Reliability Analyst, and that’s where I really found my footing. Over the next three years I worked across some genuinely fun problems - sensor feasibility programs for refinery condition monitoring, prescriptive maintenance libraries for a greenfield LNG facility, and AI-assisted PMO discovery on years of SAP maintenance data.
Fun fact: “Process Automation Engineer” sounds neatly defined until you realize it can mean anything from configuring a sensor on a refinery rooftop to writing pairwise classification logic on millions of material records. Both happened in the same year.
By 2025 I was promoted to Process Automation Engineer II, and the work scaled up - automated corrosion modelling pipelines for upstream operators, large-scale spares interchangeability and reliability programs, and selection as a presenter at OTC 2026 and API 2026 on automated corrosion modelling and RPA tooling.
Lived through the worst snowstorm of my life on assignment in St. John’s, NL - 100 cm in 48 hours. Atlantic Canada doesn’t do anything by halves.
Joining Pontem
Now I’m at Pontem Analytics as a Senior Reliability & Predictive Analytics Specialist, working on predictive analytics deployment, maintenance modelling, and reliability engineering for industrial clients.
What pulled me to Pontem is the chance to work alongside people who genuinely care about both the data side and the engineering side of these problems - and to be part of a team where the work spans research-grade analytics through production deployment and hyper care. That combination of technical depth and operational impact is exactly what I’ve been looking for.
Outside of Work
Outside the day job, I spend most of my time with my wife - whether that’s planning the next trip, working through a new recipe in the kitchen (we’ve gotten dangerously good at North Indian comfort food), or just decompressing after work with a cup of tea or a pint on the balcony.
‘Rat’- our hamster and chief decompression officer.
I’m also incurably a tinkerer. If I’m not building something at work, I’m probably building something at home. Recently that’s meant a full-stack fintech web app - built mostly because I wanted to understand the stack end-to-end - and an IoT GSM-based remote irrigation controller for a family farm back in India, designed to do the same job as commercial systems at a third the cost. More recently I’ve picked up shooting as a hobby, and somewhere on the longer-term wishlist is rebuilding cars - once I have the space and the time to do it justice. The common thread across everything I do, at work and outside it, is the same: can this be done better, simpler, or smarter than how it’s being done today?
Excited for what’s next.
Manraj