Hayden B. Keiser

Summary

Supplier Development & Manufacturing Process Engineer — ten years of supplier-facing manufacturing roles at Whirlpool, from on-site SQE work across fabricated-metal commodities to managing $400M in OEM spend: standing up new suppliers, coaching their processes to capability, and sustaining production with zero-defect parts from stable, capable processes.

Founder & Hardware Entrepreneur — took a patented consumer device from concept to sold-out production, award recognition, and national distribution — self-funded, end to end.
AI-Driven Product & Process Development Specialist — engineered AI-driven analytical instruments at KitchenAid to bolster market competitiveness; independently architected a production autonomous multi-agent AI platform spanning 114,000+ lines of first-party code.

Experience

• Took the Mixturus — a modular 3-in-1 precision botanical instrument — from a 2017 problem statement to a sold-out first production run (May 2025), entirely self-funded: 2,000+ hours of concept, CAD, and validation; RoHS/CE; utility patents pending in North America, Europe, China, and Taiwan.
• Sized and entered a $10.7B U.S. market (14% CAGR); engineered ~75% D2C gross margin into the BOM; grew to 14+ retail locations and won a national distribution partnership serving 8,500+ retail customers.
• Awarded 2nd place in both Most Innovative Product and Best New Product — 2025 CHAMPS Alternative Culture Awards; 2025 HYPE Pitch Competition Finalist; national trade-press and founder-interview coverage; exhibited at CHAMPS 2024–2026.
• Built the brand from ground zero across every platform — archetype & persona strategy, WordPress/WooCommerce storefronts operated in-house, organic social growth to 10.2K followers under restricted ad policies; operate the OASIS brand for the creator of the Genius Pipe (+33% pallet-density packaging redesign).
• Own the full industrialization chain: 54-print GD&T production package (ASME Y14.5), geometry-verified revision control, bilingual EN/中文 RFQ packages, overseas tooling negotiation, and DFM cost engineering; second product line (Artus precision travel vessel) tooled and launched.
• Awarded OEM/ODM programs by established hardware brands: new-product development & supply, NCNDA-governed sourcing, injection-molding and extrusion programs, an open-book nearshore CNC cell in Mexico, and branded electronics supply — under doc-controlled bilingual contracts drafted in-house.
• MyKyber LLC d/b/a Glimwright: AI-operated business systems consultancy.

• Solo-architected a production, always-on multi-agent AI platform: 1,444 commits in ~4.5 months; 114,072 lines of first-party Python across 545 modules — the platform autonomously authoring ~87% of its own code under a human review/merge gate.
• Brain/executor architecture on an OODA loop; consolidated 18 agent roles into 5 governed core agents orchestrating 232 concurrent work items and 25 scheduled autonomous jobs with self-healing recovery.
• Multi-model routing across 4+ LLM providers with fail-closed budget caps; custom MCP tool servers; RAG on Vertex AI (2,771 docs); 101 versioned agent skills.
• Multi-tenant AI-as-a-Service proven across 3 live client tenants; SOC 2 readiness (18-document ISMS) and a dual, tamper-evident cryptographic audit chain (Ed25519/HMAC).
• Six Sigma/8D/FMEA discipline applied to AI reliability — change-control gating, closed-loop corrective action, LLM-as-judge evaluation with Wilson 95% CIs.

• Core Team Member and KitchenAid SME on 16 global projects — supplier development, 8D, product-level and component PPAP, DFMEA.
• Improved APQP adherence 800%, reaching 91% compliance by 2024 (from 8/37 projects in 2021).
• Stood up a non-OEM manufacturing site to full product-level PPAP — a company first — for the 2022 launch (3 SKUs).
• Developed AI analysis tools (Claude, Gemini, GPT) for No Charge Parts, 5-Star, and social data — cut issue-research time 92% (3 months → 1 week).
• Drove $1.1M (2022) and $2.8M (2024) Total Cost & Quality projects; led 29-customer field test preventing $14M in TCQ; $1.6M DCM value across 33 SKUs.
• Beat Global Service Incident Rate target at 0.52% (vs 0.60% goal); ratified 2025 "P1" quality roadmap securing $1.8M in CUFT/Safe Launch funding.

• Managed 30 OEM vendors with $400M in North America spend; authored Whirlpool's WCM-grounded vendor training curriculum; trained 325+ supplier personnel across 5 OEMs.
• Led 47 programs through full product-level PPAP (~95 submissions) alongside 34 product launches; prevented $14M+ in lost MSRP sales; recovered $829K (51% YoY improvement).

• Led NPI project management across 13 North American factories; approved 200+ component-level PPAPs; 20+ Global Supplier Qualification Audits run at a standard adopted as the model for other regions.
• Partnered with rubber supplier on leak-tester project cutting PPM from 30,000 to 0 within one year.

• Drove 66+ 8D closures, cutting average closure from 120 to 56 days; coached CS1/CS2 suppliers back to capability, saving $448K/yr in labor; three supplier tool transfers (27 part numbers) with zero emergency shutdowns.

• Owned supplier quality across 40+ fabricated-metal and electromechanical suppliers; cut focus-supplier PPM 300→153 and Sigma die-casting PPM 14K→1K through on-site process-capability work.

• Designed automated gauging fixtures ($24K/yr savings); designed the assembly line and authored standardized work for a $1–5M blender program; $4.8M projected lifetime savings through launch manufacturability work.

Education & Certifications

• Kettering University (formerly GMI), Flint MI — General MBA (2019–2021); BS Industrial Engineering, minors in Business Management, Statistics & International Studies (2011–2016)
• Six Sigma Black Belt (2016–2017) · GD&T, Whirlpool University (2016) · OpEx Immersion, Whirlpool Master Black Belt Program (2017) · Google Suite Certified

Skills