Duncan Dorris

About Duncan Dorris

I\'ve spent 20 years in rooms where technical decisions become business outcomes - and I\'ve learned that the people who can speak fluently to both sides of that conversation are rare and, frankly, hard to replace.My career has lived at the intersection of engineering, business development, and strategic account management. Sometimes simultaneously. At Synaptics I held all three roles at once (I was eventually replaced by four people, which I consider a compliment). At AMD I built a hyperscale GPU FAE function from scratch, competed head-to-head with NVIDIA at the world\'s largest cloud providers, and watched the MI300X ramp take GPU revenue from near zero to over $1B in a year. Before that, at Microsoft, I helped enable Windows\' first ARM-based operating system - building the secure IP exchange infrastructure that let Microsoft share pre-release builds with Qualcomm, TI, and NVIDIA simultaneously, which is the kind of thing that keeps you up at night. and for entirely different reasons depending on the day.What I\'m actually good at: seeing a complex situation clearly from the engineering, business, and customer perspectives at the same time. Identifying what matters, cutting through the noise, and making things happen at the executive level without losing the technical credibility that gets you in the room in the first place.Most recently I\'ve been building AMD\'s FAE analytics and program management function - standing up a data platform that brought real visibility and accountability to a 225-person engineering organization that was previously flying on gut feel and spreadsheets. It turns out that when you show engineers and executives the same data, good decisions get made faster.I\'m based in Seattle and looking for the next hard problem - ideally at a company that values technical depth, moves fast, and doesn\'t confuse activity with progress.If that sounds like your organization, let\'s talk.

Experience

1. Senior Manager, Fae Program Management

   AMD

   Aug 2024 — Present · Seattle, WA, US

   Built AMD\'s FAE analytics and program management function from scratch. Designed and prototyped a PowerBI/Salesforce/Snowflake platform that replaced ad-hoc Excel reporting with automated, on-demand intelligence covering a 225-person global engineering organization. Transformed KSO-based compensation from subjective manager scoring to data-calculated metrics - and created the first visibility into engineering POC activity that leadership could actually act on.

Education

• Virginia Tech

  Economics; Mechanical Engineering

  1997 — 2000

Skills

• Integration
• Program Management
• Test Automation
• Security
• Windows
• Software Engineering
• Product Management
• Networking
• Software Project Management
• System Deployment
• Servers
• Software Design
• Lean Manufacturing
• Software Development
• Quality Assurance
• Technical Liaison
• Deployment Strategies
• Electronics Manufacturing
• Test Planning
• Hardware Development
• Manufacturing Processes
• Agile Methodologies
• Testing
• Operating Systems
• Hardware
• Mobile Devices
• Disaster Recovery