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ASAdam SzablyaWork with me
Seattle, WA · Available for founding & fractional roles

Multi-time founder.
Product-oriented
tech leader.

I build startups from the whiteboard up — architecting the platform, hiring the team, and shipping the product that finds the market. Over 15 years turning cutting-edge tech into companies people actually pay for.

See the ventures→Start a conversation
15+
Years shipping
2
US Patents · 84 claims
1 TB/hr
Telemetry piped in prod
99.99%
SLA held at scale
01 · About

Founder DNA, operator hands.

Adam Szablya
Adam Szablya
// Seattle, WA

I'm a visionary technology entrepreneur and operational leader who has spent the last decade at the seams where startups meet the frontier — 3D LiDAR perception, autonomous vehicles, connected fleets, edge ML, and the messy, wonderful infrastructure that actually makes them work in production.

I founded Metrolla — an AI perception company — and took it from concept through Series Seed with enterprise customers on the board. Before that, I architected the cloud platform behind a Fortune 100 autonomous trucking program and held four-nines SLAs across a global contact-center cloud. I've written the Python that Google's ops teams rely on, the infrastructure Kenworth and Peterbilt trucks phone home to, and the perception stack now riding on autonomous vehicles.

I read markets like code and build teams that treat production as a first-class user. If it's early, ambitious, and cutting-edge — I want in.

On the side, I make micro-angel investments — writing checks in the $5K–$20K range — for founders attacking hard problems where I'd want to be a customer. Not my main focus, but a fun way to stay close to the frontier.

// core competencies
  • Venture Fundraising
  • Product-Market Fit
  • GTM Strategy
  • Team Building
  • Enterprise Sales
  • AWS · GCP · Azure
  • Kubernetes
  • Terraform
  • CI/CD · GitOps
  • Python · Bash
  • Edge ML
  • ROS2
02 · Trajectory

Where I've operated.

  1. 01
    2020 — Present

    Metrolla

    — Founder, CEO & CTO
    Seed-stage AI Perception

    Founded an AI-powered 3D LiDAR perception company from a whiteboard sketch to Series Seed and enterprise revenue. Built the team, the stack, and the go-to-market — shipping a ROS2-native perception platform now deployed across autonomous vehicles and industrial robotics.

    • End-to-end ML pipeline: sensor fusion → edge inference → cloud analytics
    • Launched an edge software marketplace opening a new revenue channel
    • Achieved product-market fit with demonstrable unit economics
  2. 02
    2024 — 2025

    Five9

    — Senior Site Reliability Engineer
    Global Contact Center Cloud

    Owned GCP and OpenStack infrastructure holding a 99.99% SLA across a platform handling millions of daily interactions.

    • 35% MTTR reduction via systematic RCA and automation
    • 25% cloud spend reduction through autoscaling and right-sizing
    • Established a blameless post-mortem culture
  3. 03
    2017 — 2020

    PACCAR

    — Senior Cloud Engineer, Tech Lead
    Autonomous Trucking · Fortune 100

    Architected the microservices and Kubernetes platform (EKS / GKE / Anthos) powering PACCAR's autonomous and connected vehicle R&D.

    • 1 TB/hour real-time telemetry pipeline across multi-region datacenters
    • 2 PB of redundant storage with automated failover
    • 40% faster autonomous vehicle R&D cycle; 60% less deployment friction
  4. 04
    2015 — 2017

    F5 Networks

    — SDE II
    Network Infrastructure

    Built Python regression suites and multi-cloud hypervisor harnesses (AWS, Azure, vCloud, Skytap, Telus) for virtual load balancer QA.

  5. 05
    2014 — 2015

    Google

    — Contract Tools Developer
    Internal Tooling

    Shipped internal UIs and rolled out Zabbix monitoring across ~10,000 agents in 3 countries — saving 800+ labor hours per month.

03 · Ventures & Shipped Work

Things I've built.

Founded · Venture-backed

Metrolla

3D LiDAR perception & data extraction stack for autonomous vehicles, robotics, and industry.

  • ROS2
  • Edge ML
  • Kubernetes
  • Wireless-first
Founded · Marketplace

Tourzan Mobile

Uber-for-tour-guides: real-time geolocation pairing, payments, ratings, and booking in one app.

  • Mobile
  • Geolocation
  • Payments
  • Two-sided
Open Source · IoT Fleet

Open Balena Extension

Closes the gap between OSS Balena and Balena Cloud: remote terminals, remote Docker builders, Cloudflare Zero Trust.

  • Cloudflare ZT
  • Docker
  • Edge
  • OSS
Open Source · Protocols

NTCIPy

Python NTCIP library for intelligent transportation systems — signals, DMS, connected vehicle detection.

  • Python
  • ITS
  • MIB
  • Protocol
Open Source · Analytics

EthOS Dashboard

Real-time GPU, hashrate, and pool analytics for Ethereum mining operators — free where the paid tier was.

  • Dashboards
  • Real-time
  • Analytics
04 · Patents & IP

Filed, published, defended.

US Patents

Methods for Wireless Event-Driven Everything-to-Everything (X2X) Payload Delivery

Publications
2
Total Claims
84
Status
Published
Coverage
  • Event-driven distributed data delivery
  • LiDAR and sensor data streaming over networks
  • Remote persistent IoT communications & edge device management
US2022/0014884 A1 · US2024/0365092 A1
05 · Let's talk

Building something ambitious?
I'd like to hear about it.

Founding roles, fractional CTO engagements, technical advising for seed-stage startups tackling hard problems in AI, autonomy, and infrastructure.

// send a message
GitHub
castaway2000
→
LinkedIn
in/adam-szablya
→