Frank An

Experienced in architecting complex real-time audio systems, managing onshore/offshore teams and working with cross-functional teams to bring innovative product solutions to market

Embedded Engineering Manager at Extreme Engineering Solutions (2025-01 – Present)

• Led the introduction and adoption of an on-prem LLM within the engineering organization, with company-wide expansion now underway
• Directed the design and rapid prototyping of several on-premises LLM applications, including an internal project-information chatbot, a multi-vendor technical-documentation knowledge base, and a schematic-analysis tool supporting earlier software engagement in hardware development
• Managed an embedded firmware team of up to five engineers, ranging from junior to senior levels, responsible for delivering low-level firmware across the company's diverse portfolio of platforms and products, including systems based on NXP LS1043A processors and AMD Versal SoCs
• Managed a software engineering team of up to three engineers responsible for development infrastructure and advanced application development, including on-premises LLM deployment and early-stage application prototyping

Senior Manager/Consulting Engineering at Avid Technology (2016-01 – 2023-12)

• Brainstormed Machine Learning assisted workflows for DAW applications
• Directed audio and music machine learning research projects on music emotion analysis and instrument classification co-sponsored by MITACS and Avid
• Applied state of the art deep learning algorithms for music tagging and evaluated their performance on an internal dataset
• Participated in defining MILAN interop standard
• Led the engineering effort in Avid to bring Milan certified product (MLN-192) to market to further expand S6L interoperability
• Evaluated, proposed and integrated next-gen audio engine platform for Live Sound applications that saw significant performance boost compared with previous generation
• Helped support initiative to transition S6L into a Live Sound platform
• Led the Live Sound team to continue to build on the success of S6L and deliver features such as IO sharing and crucial bug fixes
• Supported product EOL replacement effort on various components in the S6L eco-system

Consulting Software Engineer at Avid Technology (2014-04 – 2016-01)

• Led a team of developers and test engineers to deliver the audio engine behind the award winning S6L, which further enhanced Avid's position in the high end Live Sound touring market
• Provided technical leadership from initial concept, software architecture, evolving development platforms to overall system integration
• Kept the team focused on high priority tasks to meet tight delivery timeline
• Brought together 3rd party technology partners to brainstorm, investigate and close challenging issues

Senior Principal Software Engineer at Avid Technology (2009-02 – 2014-03)

• Served as lead software architect to deliver S3L, a small form factor mixing console solution for the Live Sound market
• Worked across different engineering teams to bring innovative solutions to market such as AVB (Audio Video Bridging) for distributed audio over networking and AAX-DSP for hosting real-time DSP plug-ins
• Responsible for full software life cycle development from feasibility, system design to implementation and test and support
• Refactored Venue to support both TDM based and AAX-DSP based audio engine
• Added initial IO device interface and support in Venue
• Update plug-in host to be compatible with AAX-DSP for S3L
• Brought up a new development platform and expand AAX hosting capability for this platform
• Explored suitability of an ARM-based SoC for running Venue software

Project Engineer (level 4, supervisory) at Dolby Laboratories, Inc. (2003-07 – 2006-08)

• Led a team of four engineers in delivering software solutions for encoding, composing and packaging digital media files securely. This effort strengthened Dolby's leadership position in the Digital Cinema service market
• Managed project milestone, resource estimate, testing and release cycles that resulted in record delivery time
• Earned Dolby's President Award for outstanding contribution
• Led high level software architecture design and contributed to implementation
• Established product requirements, development, test and release processes to meet key milestones
• Liaised with other product teams to coordinate release schedules and ensure file compatibilities
• Served on configuration management board to improve division wide software configuration processes
• Guided junior members of the team to integrate and test 3rd-party components

Project Engineer at Dolby Laboratories, Inc. (1999-08 – 2003-06)

• Took initiative to evaluate and propose an alternate development platform and obtained senior management buy-in to adopt for production. Its implementation cut development cost of future projects by $250,000 a year
• Worked closely with R&D to transfer the time-scaling technology to a real-time product and broaden Dolby's presence in the professional broadcast market
• Enhanced customer value by implementing software in new digital add-on card for our flagship product CP650 that brought in revenues of US$1million per year for the company
• Developed a software reference codec for an audio stream format that facilitated Dolby's effort to push this technology as industry standard. This effort cut the testing time of real-time decoder on various platforms by half
• Introduced innovative solutions in each phase of product life cycle, flexible system architecture, multi-threaded programming, and rigorous regression testing

Software Design Engineer at Dolby Laboratories, Inc. (1998-04 – 1999-07)

• Led software product effort to revise products for the studio mastering service business that led to improved profit margin of 10%
• Migrated and optimized many software modules, such as a multi-DSP encoder implementation to a single DSP
• Organized proper data paths and improving an I/O framework to facilitate inter-DSP data passing

DSP Member of Technical Staff at S3, Inc. (1996-03 – 1998-04)

• Designed firmware architecture that put S3 on the map in the PC audio acceleration market
• Developed a C model for audio synthesis algorithms to improve time to market
• Improved 3rd party audio synthesis algorithm
• Designed and developed firmware to support Microsoft technology (DirectSound)

MBA in Business Administration and Management, General – University of Toronto (2006 – 2008)

MS in Electrical Engineering – The University of Toledo (1993 – 1996)

BS in Electronics Engineering – Shanghai Jiao Tong University (1987 – 1991)