Title: Senior Design Engineer
Company: AVI-SPL
Location: Seattle, WA
Overtime: She spent significant time collaging during the pandemic, and creating art has become a source of stress relief for her. She has also dedicated more time to running and recently trained for and completed her first half marathon.
Why You Need to Know Her: As a senior design engineer at AVI-SPL within its Product and Solutions Group (PSG), Holly Clausen is responsible for creating and managing all AVI-SPL reference designs. However, she notes that a large team collaborates to bring these designs to life.
“While I take the lead on these projects, it is an honor to see how many people both inside and outside of AVI-SPL come together to review, provide feedback, and add to the overall value of these designs,” she explained. She views herself as a person who strives to understand all facets of life, and she finds this approach reflected in various ways throughout her engineering career.
Clausen remembered her fortunate start in the industry when Don De Mello hired her during her freshman year at Oregon State University, a position she maintained throughout college. She worked at the AV helpdesk, spending countless hours saying, “Helpdesk, this is Holly,” assisting professors in the classroom with their AV challenges.
This experience helped her secure her first job out of college as a service technician at CompView, a small AV integration company located in Portland, OR. She subsequently returned to OSU full-time as an equipment systems specialist before joining her current employer, AVI-SPL, in 2019. Before she arrived at AVI-SPL, she obtained her Limited Energy Class B license in Oregon, which she considers a crucial foundation for her work as an AV engineer.
Starting her career with AVI-SPL as a project engineer, she appreciated the company's support for her education in integration through training and hands-on experience with high-profile clients. “Working for AVI-SPL for the past [almost] six years has been the most formative period of my career,” she said. This led to her recent promotion to senior design engineer for PSG, making her the only design engineer on the team.
“While PSG has many great aspects to be proud of, including our dedicated lab space in Chicago and our bi-weekly Innovation Accelerator company-wide call, one of our more exciting focuses as a team is our ability to review new and emerging products,” she said. “This brings me great joy because we understand that our feedback empowers the entire industry, not just AVI-SPL, and I feel lucky to be part of a team that advances our industry as a whole.”
PSG engineering manager Jeremy T. Vierck said Clausen instantly stood out when he interviewed her for her current role due to the advanced level at which she communicates, which he commented was quite rare within the AV engineering community. “Holly’s well-balanced and high-level IQ and EQ allow her to confidently think and work outside of the expected capabilities of a typical engineer,” he said.
Clausen's colleague at PSG, Adam Stanton, often says, “The job we will hold in five years does not exist yet,” and she wholeheartedly agrees. She has always appreciated how the industry is continually evolving, enabling her to grow and develop alongside it. “In the future, I hope to continue to advance technology and create a positive culture at AVI-SPL, much like the one I was able to experience at OSU, full of laughter and learning,” she added.
