Steve Jester Email Address

Director of R and D

Digi International is a leading global provider of mission-critical machine-to-machine (M2M) and Internet of Things (IoT) connectivity products and services. We help our customers create next-generation connected products and deploy and manage critical communications infrastructures in demanding environments with high levels of security, relentless reliability and bulletproof performance.

I help companies grow and make a difference through new product introduction. I am extremely motivated and embrace the challenge of solving difficult problems whether it be team building, performance, culture, technical or strategic creative solutions for new product markets. I accelerate product development by mentoring, enabling and empowering the entire team. Aside from my strong technical achievements and business acumen, I have the personality, experience and abilities to create a culture that supports an effective, lean, motivated, world-class engineering team who enjoy and are pleased with their work contributions. EXPERIENCE - 28 year career with strong medical device development experience - Successfully grew, mentored, led, efficient multidisciplinary engineering teams - Worked as engineer, project manager, director, and P&L owner with teams at multiple sites for start-ups and large multinational companies - Developed technologies: MRI electrophysiology mapping; angiography; blood dialysis; neurostimulation; cardiac pacing & ablation; automated immunoassay systems - Creatively adapted technology across industries to create electromechanical solutions for medical, industrial and military products - Architected solutions for businesses on their digital transformation journey (IOT) LEADERSHIP - Out of the box thinker who listens to all perspectives - Creative visionary who collaboratively strategizes to meet corporate goals while building productive, positive culture - Change agent who has successfully influenced & facilitated transformation of underperforming teams to world-class, cohesive, high output organizations - Trusted leader with transparent, open personality who naturally establishes trust with employees, creates environment for exceptional team motivation - Team builder who consistently creates high performing teams to meet company objectives through recruiting, mentoring and hands-on technical leadership PROGRAM MANAGEMENT - Brought many products from concept design into production - Served as the Project Manager and Systems Lead for hundreds of projects - Managed customer communications, schedule, resources, budget, requirements, project risks and mitigations while providing technical contributions for new product development programs - Developed proposals as technical solution expert for customer products & projects - Mediated with teams to keep projects on track internally while managing customer expectations