Josh Tarbutton

I enrolled at Georgia Tech and enlisted in the Army Reserve the same month, January 1999. I did both at once for the next six years, which set the pattern for everything after it. I have rarely been doing only one thing.

I deployed to Iraq in 2003 and came home in 2004, in the middle of the degree. Platoon Sergeant, responsible for 21 soldiers and the equipment they depended on. It taught me what accountability actually weighs. That is a different thing from being told about it.

The mobilization took me out of my graduating semester, so the bachelor's in mechanical engineering came in 2005, about fifteen months later than it would have. I was already working while I finished it. High-voltage switch testing and fabrication at Southern States. Energy audits at Georgia Tech's Economic Development Center. A system identification internship at Timken in 2006.

Clemson in 2006, for the master's and then the doctorate. The MS came in 2007, the same year my enlistment ended. The PhD took until 2011: 5-axis GPU-accelerated CNC toolpath planning, written in CUDA, C++ and Direct3D, to make machine tools cut faster and more accurately. I hold a patent in precision measurement and have over 50 peer-reviewed publications across mechatronics, vibration control, and additive manufacturing.

An NSF and ASEE postdoctoral fellowship at InSituTec in 2011 and 2012, where we built the world's smallest contact metrology device for MEMS sidewall and depth measurement. In the same stretch I wrote software for a Navy SBIR at Tucker Innovations, on volumetric calculation algorithms that went to a Phase III subcontract.

Then the University of South Carolina from 2012 to 2016, and UNC Charlotte from 2016 to 2021. Nine years. Tenured on 1 July 2020, and Assistant Director of Research for UNC Charlotte's Advanced Manufacturing EPIC. I ran labs funded by NSF, DOE, ONR, DARPA, NASA, and Boeing. Teaching was the job that taught me the most useful thing I know: how to take something complicated and make it clear enough to act on.

In 2017 I co-founded a machine shop and engineering design house with partners. I was out of it inside the year, and not by my own choice. It is still operating. I learned more from that year than from any year that went well, and most of what I learned was about who you build with.

I founded Bravo Team in January 2018, while I was still a professor, and kept teaching for three more years after that. The teaching salary carried us early on, which meant the firm could put what it earned back into itself rather than into me. I would rather a company owe its bench and its equipment to its own work than to somebody else's terms. It does.

Bravo Team is roughly forty engineers now, with a machine and fabrication shop inside the company that I built from one machine to five. Three consecutive years on the Inc. 5000. Number two fastest-growing company in Charlotte in 2024. I moved from CEO to Chairman in 2025.

The reason any of this belongs on a business page: I wrote a dissertation on 5-axis toolpath planning and the firm runs a 5-axis shop. I ran labs funded by NSF, DOE, ONR, DARPA, NASA and Boeing, and the firm now works in the same industries those programs served. Nine years of teaching is why the first thing you get here is an explanation you can act on rather than a proposal you have to decode. I did not change careers in 2018. I changed who I do the work for.

I speak Spanish at a professional working level. I am an EO Charlotte member. I am a licensed Professional Engineer and a member of the Order of the Engineer. I invest in early-stage founders, and I am a longtime student of Bill Wilder's Wilder Method, which has done more for how I lead than any management book. I serve as Chairman of Bravo Team and I am still building.

What I do now is mostly listening. People bring me problems. I put the right people on them. The right people are everyone else at Bravo Team, plus the friends with labs we call when a problem needs a different kind of room. I do not take the work myself anymore. It is the single best decision I have made for this company. Meet the team →