Rawad Al Souki
Electrical engineering senior, University of Iowa
Power systems & automation · Graduating May 2027 · Iowa City, IA
Electrical engineering senior, University of Iowa
Power systems & automation · Graduating May 2027 · Iowa City, IA
My father and uncle ran an electrical distribution business back home. I grew up around their jobs, and that is why I ended up in power instead of pure software.
Since 2023 I have co-founded and run delivery for an automation company: 30-plus client projects across five countries, bootstrapped, no outside money. I am looking for a full-time engineering role in power delivery, grid operations, or industrial automation, starting May 2027.
Not coursework. Real systems with real users.
A 50-plus node Arabic and English WhatsApp system for a school with two campuses. It routes parent messages across 21 departments, keeps staff numbers private, and sends anything sensitive to a human instead of answering it. The last blocker was not my code: the sender stayed locked until Meta business verification cleared. Read the error before you touch a working system. That one cost me a week.
I own the firmware on a four-person team: two DS18B20 probes on the 1-Wire bus, a battery-powered display and buttons, and readings streamed to our cloud dashboard for a live chart and threshold alerts. Built, checked off, documented.
A sourcing dashboard on a live job-data API with real spreadsheet export and a demo mode that falls back to fixtures. All seven acceptance criteria verified by automated browser tests, zero console errors. I also killed an earlier scraping approach after a feasibility review rather than promise data we could not legally reach.
The three stories I would tell you over coffee.
I booked an appointment as a customer and timed it: 21 hours and three follow-ups. The cause was not lazy staff. Demand peaked from 7:00 to 7:30am and 5:30 to 6:30pm, which is outside every branch's opening hours. I built a side-by-side demo of the same booking handled in 47 seconds after close, in Arabic, English and Arabizi.
Not a handshake deal: a real procurement with scoring. Seven-phase scope, fixed price, milestone payments, six-month warranty, full IP transfer on acceptance. We made the final three.
I was the engineering lead. Six to twelve hour cases that had to be technically feasible and commercially viable, defended live in front of industry judges. We finished last on the opening case and won the whole thing, plus Best Engineering Solution.
Email me and my résumé comes back the same day. If you would rather talk, tell me a time and I will make it work.
Iowa City, Iowa