About

I’m Adam Phelps. I’ve lived in San Francisco since 2003 and have kept a metal and fabrication shop in West Oakland since 2017. The day job is building distributed systems; the rest of my time goes to the shop, building physical things.

The day job is Principal Engineer at Cisco Umbrella, where I’ve spent sixteen years on the data infrastructure behind one of the world’s largest DNS-layer security services. The work has ranged from internet-scale graph storage to real-time event-processing pipelines to the policy systems behind Cisco’s current SASE offering. Before Cisco I spent a decade at 3PAR as the initial engineer on the Remote Copy replication system — software that still ships in HPE production arrays today, and the work I hold a handful of US patents on (storage replication, snapshot differencing, write-ordering semantics). The patents are old now. The systems are still in production.

The shop is in West Oakland: CNC plasma cutter, lasers, mills, 3D printers, full metalworking gear. Since 2016 I’ve operated under my LLC, AmpWorks Studio, as an independent engineering practice — hardware design, custom electronics, large-scale interactive installations. I treat this work the way I treat the day job: professional engineering, applied to art and atmosphere rather than to enterprise infrastructure, with the same care and the same rigor. The signature project is Lightbringer, a vehicle-scale art piece I built with the Gigsville theme camp at Burning Man between 2017 and 2022. The underlying control framework — HMTL, for Heavy Metal Tiki Lounge — is open source, started as the controller stack for an earlier art car called Ku, and is still running production hardware in the field nearly a decade later.

The two halves of what I do are less separate than they look. Both are about building infrastructure that other people use without seeing — a DNS resolver answering a billion queries an hour, or an art car running addressable LEDs and propane flame effects across a multi-week deployment in the desert. Both reward precision, ruggedness, and the instinct to design for the world as it actually is rather than the world as you’d like it to be. I’m strongly hands-on across both. Builder, not advisor.

What I’m most interested in right now is the intersection of agentic AI and real-world physical production — printed buildings, self-producing robotic systems, AI driving fabrication directly. The substrate is already there in practice: embedded systems, machine-controlled tooling, plasma cutters and lasers and printers. The missing piece historically has been the orchestration layer that turns design intent into physical output without losing fidelity through the translation, and the current generation of AI tooling is starting to be able to close that gap. The combination of substantial fabrication capability with usable AI orchestration is, I think, a near-term frontier worth taking seriously.

Getting in touch. AmpWorks Studio takes on senior architect / lead engineer / technical principal engagements on a part-time basis — three days a week or less. For collaboration, project conversations, hardware questions, or anything else, reach me at amp@ampworksstudio.com or on GitHub and LinkedIn.