Why this exists.
I am applying for the Construction Project Manager role in heavy civil and excavation. Autonomous earthworks. The seat where the built environment meets the software stack.
Most resumes describe past projects in past tense. I wanted you to open something that smells like your own product on the very first click. So I built a working demo of Mission Control. One operator. Three machines. Real Austin sites. Live telemetry. Live sensor readings. A SimCity-style grid planner with deterministic simulation. The same console a PM should live inside every day.
I built this in a weekend. The full version takes a quarter.
Where I come from.
- Woodbury UniversityB.Arch
Architecture trained. Drawing, scale, materials, code, permitting, construction docs.
- Gruen AssociatesCivic + Government Delivery
Public-sector projects, agency coordination, schedule and budget under regulatory pressure.
- Entertainment PartnersProduct Operations
Production-grade software ops at scale. SaaS, contracts, payroll, regulatory edges.
- NLT143 ResearchFounder + Builder
Ship code, ship hardware, ship a thesis. Working independently, working with operators.
Most candidates lean one direction: built environment, or software. I was trained on the first and have been shipping the second for years. Autonomous earthworks is the rare domain where both stacks point at the same problem.
Electrons. Matter. Intelligence.
I think every meaningful technology stack reduces to three layers. Autonomous earthworks is the first construction domain I have seen that maps cleanly to all three.
Power and data backbone feeding retrofitted yellow iron. Mission Control runs on Electrons. Every cycle and pose is a packet.
Dirt, steel, concrete, yellow iron. The substrate the industry is learning to address at scale. Cubic yards is the unit of progress.
Mission Planner plus human in the loop autonomy. One operator, three machines. That ratio is the breakthrough.
The job, in six verbs.
- Plan.
Scope, budget, schedule, machine assignment, submittal log, RFI register. The Mission Planner drawer is the artifact.
- Execute.
Cycle by cycle. Cubic yard by cubic yard. The map and fleet panel are the live state machine.
- Protect.
Safety regs and incident days. Geofences. Take over the moment the job gets weird.
- Communicate.
Clients, EOR, AHJ, subs. Status, milestones, RFIs answered fast.
- Train.
Operators learn the console, not the seat. Coach the takeover loop. Coach the data review.
- Improve.
Telemetry into a feedback loop. Cycles per gallon, yards per shift, faults per machine. Drive the numbers down or up on purpose.
A note to whoever is hiring.
The teams building autonomous earthworks understand something most of construction has missed. Infrastructure is the bottleneck on nearly everything else humans want to build. Construction is the integration layer of civilization, and right now it ships at twentieth century throughput. Autonomy is how that changes.
The operator console for a fleet of retrofitted machines is not a dashboard bolted on at the end. It is the product. It is where the plan, the telemetry, the takeover, and the after-action all live. That is the surface I want to run.
I want to run a jobsite for you. Not as a vendor. As a teammate who already speaks the product.
Construction is not a market. It is the integration layer of civilization. Someone is going to write the compiler.
Move dirt. Move civilization.
David T Phung / mcc.davidtphung.com