Tamil Kadir Rajavel
Director of Engineering at Williams AV
I’m Tamil, and I run engineering at Williams AV. We make assistive listening systems, including Bluetooth Auracast, for live events, houses of worship, classrooms, courtrooms and other places that need to work for people with hearing loss. Before Williams I spent nine years at Rockwell Automation, starting in embedded firmware and ending up as a product manager. Before that I was an electrical engineer at Joby Aviation.
What I’ve done
I’ve worked at a venture-backed startup, a Fortune 500 company and a PE-backed small business. Each one runs on a different playbook, and what works at one can hurt you at another.
Open any line for the longer story.
Director of Engineering, Williams AV PE-backed small business
We make assistive listening systems, including Bluetooth Auracast devices. At one point we were stuck on what the next product for a key segment should be. I proposed a modified version of Google Ventures’ design sprint, and two weeks of sketches, rough prototypes and user interviews got us to a product vision the team could get behind. It also killed a feature. We’d planned to make the device rechargeable, and almost every user we talked to said they wouldn’t have time to charge it or would forget.
Embedded engineer to product manager, Rockwell Automation Fortune 500
Nine years. I started in embedded firmware and moved into product management, which was the hardest change I’ve made. Engineering is mostly black and white. Product management is gray, and you make calls before all the information is in. It’s why I understand what the PMs on my team are dealing with now.
Electrical engineer, Joby Aviation Venture-backed startup
I worked on eVTOL aircraft systems, in collaboration with NASA.
M.S. Electrical Engineering, University of Minnesota Grad school
Focused on power and embedded systems. I grew up in Chennai and Mumbai and came to the U.S. for grad school here.
Volunteer CTO, MN Tamil Sangam and Tamil School Volunteer, until 2026
I set up the community website on WordPress, ran the school’s Moodle learning system and built a timeline of Tamil history from scratch, on a headless CMS with a Vue.js front end. I also ran their AWS infrastructure.
Parai instructor and performance lead, MN Tamil Sangam Volunteer, 2017 to 2023
I taught Parai, a traditional Tamil percussion instrument. I was a board member and led the performance team at community events.
AI workshop instructor, MN Tamil Sangam Volunteer, summer 2025
I taught a week-long introduction to AI and machine learning for high schoolers from the Tamil School and working professionals, focused on applications in Tamil.
Speaker, Minnebar 20 May 2026
My first public talk: “Shipping Atoms and Bits: What Building Physical Products Taught Me About Better Engineering Decisions.”
What I focus on
- Product development
- From first concept to production, hardware through software. Most of my work has been on products where the electronics, the firmware and the software all have to work as one product.
- Team building
- Hiring engineers, deciding how to organize the team around them, and working out how much process is enough before it starts slowing everyone down.
- Technical strategy
- Build versus buy, architecture choices, and roadmap calls where the budget is real and the answer isn’t obvious.