Capacity before headcount
Uses Lean and process audits to identify waste, applies technology to increase capacity, and coordinates resource sharing across departments before building the case for additional hiring.
Engineering operations & portfolio leadership
Pittsburgh, PennsylvaniaGaurav Sharma
Building stronger teams.
Advancing portfolio performance.
Gaurav Sharma leads engineering and project management operations across North America—developing leaders, aligning capacity with business goals, and improving delivery and profitability. He champions responsible AI adoption to help teams make better use of their knowledge and time.
19+ years of international experience across India, the UAE, Canada, and the United States.
Current role
Senior Project Engineering Manager, North America
ProMinent Fluid Controls Inc. · June 2023–Present
- North American team
- 45 people · 10 direct reports
- Delivery performance
- 10% more projects · same headcount
- Knowledge retrieval & review
- 1–2 hours · previously 2–3 days
Delivery: 2026 YTD versus the same period in 2025, USA and Canada combined. Knowledge retrieval and review: team-reported estimate, depending on project size.
01 Leadership scope
Connecting people, capacity
and business performance.
Leading a 45-person organization across the USA and Canada, Gaurav brings engineering delivery, project management, workforce planning, and commercial discipline into a shared operating approach.
North American organization
10 direct reports across both countries
United States Canada
32 team members in the USA · 13 in Canada10 direct reports across both countries
Functions led
- Project Managers
- Project Engineers
- Electrical Engineers
- Mechanical Designers
- Technical Documentation
Budgets grounded in delivery
Builds portfolio budget inputs from team capacity and past performance, then works with senior leadership to align achievable delivery plans with annual business targets.
Commercial learning, applied earlier
Reviews realized margins against quoted margins and brings the findings back into estimating. Reference designs and lessons learned help teams base engineering and production labor estimates on comparable completed work.
Leaders who can lead independently
Develops PMs’ judgment in routine commercial decisions, client relationships, stakeholder coordination, and resource sharing. Teams work directly with one another, freeing leadership capacity for longer-term priorities.
Building the leadership pipeline
Turning individual potential into greater responsibility.
Through an eight-month development plan, Gaurav helped a mechanical designer prepare for and secure an internal Project Engineer role, then continued coaching his progression into project management. He also trained and mentored a production manager who transitioned into project management in Canada.
His people responsibilities include performance and promotion decisions, leadership development, and ROI-based business cases for hiring and new positions, in coordination with HR and senior leadership.
02 Selected impact
More delivery capacity.
Stronger execution discipline.
Selected outcomes connect leadership decisions with delivery capacity, customer commitments, and commercial performance.
Portfolio throughput
More projects. Same headcount.
10%
More projects delivered across North America.
- Challenge
- Meet higher delivery expectations without making additional hiring the default response.
- Leadership action
- Combined Lean process improvement, AI-enabled knowledge tools, and cross-team resource sharing. Developed PMs’ ability to coordinate workloads and make routine decisions independently.
- Result
- Teams delivered 10% more projects with the same headcount, alongside improved portfolio profitability.
USA and Canada combined. 2026 year-to-date versus the same period in 2025; reported October 2026.
Delivery reliability
Engineering document submission
99.8%
Up from 83% over two years.
Before83%
After99.8%
97% KPI requirement
- Challenge
- Engineering document flow was affecting customer satisfaction and needed a more reliable submission process.
- Leadership action
- Gaurav analyzed stakeholders and constraints, applied Lean Six Sigma to eliminate waste, refined the workflow, and established a KPI for timely submission.
- Result
- Document submission performance reached 99.8%. Teams exceeded the 97% requirement for 11 consecutive months.
Performance reported October 2026.
Commercial performance
Portfolio profitability
Above benchmark.
Improved from below the internal benchmark.
- Challenge
- Portfolio profitability was below the internal benchmark, with process waste and limited visibility of financial performance requiring attention.
- Leadership action
- Identified underestimated engineering and production effort, strengthened visibility of quoted versus realized margins, and combined waste reduction with shared reference designs and lessons learned to improve future labor estimates.
- Result
- Portfolio profitability moved above the internal benchmark following the combined program of changes.
Result reported October 2026.
03 AI leadership
Making AI useful.
Building judgment alongside it.
Gaurav champions responsible AI adoption across North American operations through hands-on tool development and team coaching. Adoption extends across Engineering, Application Engineering, Sales, and Procurement—an initiative he has taken beyond his formal engineering remit.
Bring past experience into the next decision
Launched AI-enabled drawing and lessons-learned libraries that help teams retrieve relevant project designs and experience. Application Engineers use comparable completed projects to develop more accurate labor estimates and prepare more quotations.
Build tools around everyday work
Built retrieval-based vendor-reference tools and trained users. Procurement compares vendor quotes with RFQs and invoices with purchase orders; Sales uses AI to strengthen market research.
Keep people accountable for the result
Internal engineering AI key users regularly audit library data. Users receive guidance to check AI-generated results, while vendor-reference tools flag outdated information for replacement.
Reported workflow improvement
2–3 days to 1–2 hours.
Time to find and review relevant past-project information, depending on project size. This is a team-reported estimate, rather than a formally measured average.
Connect technical review with contractual decisions
An AI-assisted review surfaced a mismatch between the assumed feed material and the client’s intended operating conditions. Gaurav escalated the risk to the client’s engineer, prompting redesign and agreement on revised contractual performance guarantees. Redesign is underway.
Make complex specifications easier to review
Developing an AI-assisted tool to review client engineering specifications that can run to 500–2,000 pages. The aim is to support Application Engineering and project engineering; operational time savings have not yet been established.
Executive learning
Artificial Intelligence: Business Strategies and Applications · Berkeley Haas · 2024
View qualifications04 International career
Experience across India,
the UAE, Canada & the USA.
A progression from technical sales and proposals to project delivery, engineering supervision, and North American portfolio leadership brings both technical and commercial context to the current role.
- USAJun 2023–Present
Senior Project Engineering Manager, North America
ProMinent Fluid Controls Inc. · Pittsburgh
Leads a 45-person engineering and project management organization across the U.S. and Canada, with responsibility for portfolio delivery, capacity, people development, budget planning, and performance improvement.
- CanadaJul 2015–Jun 2023
Progressive project & engineering leadership
ProMinent Canada · Guelph, Ontario
- Senior Project ManagerApr 2021–Jun 2023
- Project Engineering SupervisorJan 2019–Apr 2021
- Team Leader (Projects)Jan 2016–Dec 2018
- Project LeadJul–Dec 2015
- UAEJun 2013–Feb 2015
Senior Engineer — Projects (Proposals)
Petronash FZE · Dubai
Technical and commercial proposals, multidisciplinary inputs, project budgets and schedules, vendor coordination, and customer progress reporting.
- IndiaSep 2007–May 2013
Technical sales, projects & proposals
- Senior Engineer, Projects & Proposals · Milton Roy IndiaApr 2011–May 2013 · Noida
- Project Engineer · S.K. SystemsApr 2009–Mar 2011 · New Delhi
- Sales Engineer · DanfossSep 2007–Mar 2009 · New Delhi
05 Credentials
Management discipline.
AI business perspective.
Professional certifications in project management and agile practice, complemented by executive learning in AI strategy and business applications.
PMI certification
Project Management Professional (PMP)®
Project Management Institute
Issued September 11, 2020
Valid through September 11, 2029
PMI certification
PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP)®
Project Management Institute
Issued July 24, 2021
Valid through July 24, 2027
Berkeley Haas · Executive learning
Artificial Intelligence: Business Strategies and Applications
University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business
Issued November 25, 2024
Certificate of completion
Google Project Management Certificate
Google · Coursera · 2022
Credential recordCertified ScrumMaster (CSM)
Scrum Alliance · Awarded 2020
View credential historyAcademic foundation
B.E., Mechanical EngineeringVisvesvaraya Technological University · 2006
Postgraduate Diploma, Business ManagementICFAI · 2012–2013
06 Recommendations
Leadership seen across
engineering and sales.
Selected excerpts from LinkedIn recommendations received on October 15, 2026.
Direct manager
“strives for deep connections with everyone while still driving constant improvement.”
Cross-functional colleague
“a thoughtful, customer-focused perspective”
Senior colleague
“combines technical capability with a practical, customer-focused approach.”
07 Leadership opportunities
Stronger teams.
Better portfolio outcomes.
Connect with Gaurav about engineering operations, program and portfolio leadership, or practical AI adoption that strengthens people and business performance.