Wayne Santoro: ATE Manager - Lancaster
At CAES, our people are our most important asset. We sat down with several of our engineers to learn more about their career paths, interests and why they enjoy working at CAES. Read on to learn more about Wayne Santoro, ATE Manager.
In Wayne Santoro's family, you are either a teacher or an engineer, and as a kid Wayne was naturally drawn to engineering. Wayne grew up taking anything electrical apart that he could. When he got to middle school, Santoro started to write his own software code.
In high school, Wayne took all of the programming classes he could. In college, he switched gears to electrical engineering to have a wider option of potential career paths and completed a co-op in Lansdale, Pennsylvania, with a control systems company. Upon graduating with his degree in 2000, Wayne started work in telecommunications.
After exploring several career options, Santoro found his way back to engineering and went on to work at a company called Steel Cloud, which designed hardware, PC's and servers. Wayne worked with Fairchild Controls (Airbus) for over 10 years, before Airbus sold Fairchild Controls to Triumph Thermal Systems (TTS). Once Fairchild Controls was sold, Wayne knew it was time to start looking for work elsewhere until he was eventually hired by Ultra (now CAES) a few weeks later.
Throughout all of his professional experiences, including his role with CAES as ATE Manager, Wayne shared how it is the people and the work that drive and motivate him. He has always preferred to work at a smaller company where you are able to play a bigger role, seeing this direct impact makes the hard work worth it to him.
“You get to make a lot of impact at a smaller company, being able to see the direct results of your work," said Wayne.
Day to day, Wayne spends his time in meetings collaborating on projects, planning new ATE development, supporting hardware and software needs, while simultaneously keeping an eye open to possible issues with the production floor. Santoro will occasionally still find time to develop software for newer ATE designs, while providing architectural direction for our next generation ATE platform.
Wayne is happy to mentor young engineers who are excited to learn, sharing how passing down knowledge and seeing the light bulbs go off makes it meaningful.
When asked to give career advice to young engineers, Wayne said, “be comfortable with being uncomfortable. The industry changes so quickly that you will always be learning, and it starts to be fun once you feel comfortable in the environment."
On the weekends you can find Wayne on the sidelines cheering on one of his four kids at their sporting events.