Timothy (Tim) Prater

Timothy (Tim) Prater

Knoxville, TN - Remote

timothy.r.prater@gmail.com

Principal 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