Summary
Steve Sakoman is an experienced executive and embedded systems technologist with 26 years of leadership spanning startups through major public companies, currently running Sakoman Inc. where he consults on embedded Linux, Yocto, kernel and boot firmware work for industries from aerospace to defense. He has led product and engineering teams at Apple, PalmSource, and Be, played a central role in porting Mac OS to Intel and delivering Mac OS X Tiger, and helped take a garage startup through rounds of financing to IPO. A founding member of the Yocto Project Advisory Board and long-term Yocto LTS maintainer, he combines deep hardware design and board bring-up skills with modern reproducible build and DevOps practices. His open-source contributions include build/release fixes and CVE mitigations in the widely used OpenEmbedded core, reflecting a pragmatic focus on secure, reproducible embedded builds. Based in Philomath, Oregon, he pairs executive strategy with hands-on technical problem solving—from SMD rework to boot-time optimization—making him rare among senior leaders for continued low-level engineering involvement.
26 years of coding experience
28 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science Computer Engineering, Bachelor of Science Computer Engineering at Case Western Reserve University