
Timothy (Tim) Prater
Knoxville, TN - Remote
timothy.r.prater@gmail.comPrincipal Product Manager
Engineering Manager
Director of Engineering
Product Development, Architecture, and Technical Leadership
I turn customer, field and market feedback into product requirements, build the business case, and own it through launch. I owned the end to end roadmap for the M2M, IoT and private wireless portfolio.
I have taken multiple products from ideation through implementation. Before each one went live I wrote and delivered the training for Engineering, Operations and Sales.
I started deep in the work. Mobile core operations, LTE network engineering, IP routing and switching, data pipelines, and systems integration across telecom, cloud, and enterprise environments. I was the person who understood how things worked in production.
Over time the work expanded. I moved into product development and technical strategy, leading RFP responses that influenced $10M+ in annual business and designing private wireless and cloud-connected solutions for enterprise and government accounts. Those came with security requirements spanning NIST compliance, zero trust access control, and perimeter hardening. I was the senior technical voice in rooms where architecture decisions got made.
What carried across was the ability to operate at both ends: deep enough to know when an architecture has a real problem or a security gap, and senior enough to translate that into something a VP or a client can act on. I have built delivery frameworks from scratch, and taken on the ambiguous work that falls between org chart boxes.
Along the way I built and led teams, wrote training programs, created governance frameworks that included security review checkpoints and change control standards, and developed engineers who went on to take on bigger roles themselves. I care about building people the same way I care about building systems.
Targeting principal product management, solutions engineering, and technical leadership roles in wireless, where technical depth, business impact, and people leadership all matter. Based in Knoxville, TN and open to remote.
19+
Years in wireless, most of it building and leading products
30+
Signed contracts, $500K to $3M each
88%
Engineering ticket volume reduction via frontline enablement, ~2,000 to ~240 monthly
11–13
Cross-functional team members led across engineering, operations, and customer-facing roles
Technical Domains
Telecom and Private Wireless
LTE, 5G, EPC, private cellular, MVNO, IoT/M2M
Cloud Architecture
AWS, cloud hosted core deployments, FedRAMP authorized services
Networking and Security
IP routing, BGP, OSPF, IPsec, segmentation, WAF, zero trust
Product and Roadmap
Requirements, business case, pricing, launch and adoption
Observability and Operations
CloudWatch, monitoring, incident response
Solutions and Presales
RFP/RFI, HLD/LLD, architecture assessments