In April 2026, Pre Compliance welcomed Austin Blum to the team. Austin joins us with a background that is unusually well matched to certification work: several years running formal test programs on life-critical hardware, and several before that designing products that had to survive real-world abuse.
Austin comes to Pre from Medtronic, where he spent more than two years as a hardware test engineer in Lafayette, Colorado. Medical devices carry some of the most demanding verification requirements of any industry — every test has to be planned, justified, instrumented and documented well enough that a reviewer who was not in the room can follow it. That is precisely the discipline a seismic certification program needs. A shake table report is only as good as the test plan behind it, and Austin has spent his career writing plans that answer the question before it is asked.
Before Medtronic, Austin was a mechanical design engineer at Karakoram in North Bend, Washington, designing splitboard bindings and hardware for backcountry snowboarding. Gear like that gets loaded, frozen, iced over and stepped on, often all in the same afternoon, and it has to keep working a long way from anywhere. Designing to that standard leaves an engineer with a good instinct for how a product actually behaves at its limits — which is the instinct we lean on when deciding how a piece of equipment will be mounted, instrumented and evaluated on the table. He has also worked as a mechanical engineer at StormSensor in Seattle and got his start on the University of Washington Formula Motorsports team.
Austin holds a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Washington and is an Engineer in Training.
Fittingly for someone who spent a year designing splitboard hardware, Austin puts it to use. He lives in Bend and spends his own time on rock and snow — climbing through the summer, and splitboarding in the backcountry once the season turns.
Austin’s addition expands our capacity for shake table programs, analysis and certification support for manufacturers of critical mechanical and electrical equipment. Meet the rest of the team
