Growing team of hardware and software engineers has new leader

Opto 22 has promoted Engineering Manager Ken Johnson to company Vice President of Engineering. In his new post, long-time employee Johnson will expand his current leadership of the company’s Engineering group with an increased role in corporate strategic planning.

During his two-year leadership of the Engineering group, Johnson managed a growing team of electrical engineers and software developers in planning and building Opto 22 I/O and control products, including the recent groov, which simplifies mobile interface development and use for industrial automation.

Johnson says bringing groov to market was his biggest accomplishment in that time. Opto 22 CEO and President Mark Engman agrees, saying “groov was a challenging product in terms of hardware and software development. Getting the groov Box hardware appliance out the door, followed shortly by groov Server for Windows software, was a technical and management challenge that Ken really stepped up to.”

Johnson has been with Opto 22 since 1994, serving briefly as Network Manager and then as Senior Project Engineer until becoming Engineering Manager in 2011. Johnson holds a B.S. in Engineering Physics from the University of California, Berkeley, and an M.S. in Physics from the University of California, San Diego.