Marty Griffin
Studied at University of California, Riverside
Works at Stryker
Available tomorrow at 9:00 PM UTC
Questions? Start chatting with this coach before you get started.
About Marty
I'm Marty, a software R&D leader, indie builder, and lifelong tinkerer based in Orange, CA. By day, I'm a Senior R&D Manager at Stryker's Surgical Technologies Division, leading a software team that builds surgical safety platforms used in operating rooms around the world. I've spent 12+ years in software across the electric vehicle and medical device industries — two fields where the code you ship has to work, every time, for people who are counting on it. That shaped how I think about AI: with genuine excitement, and genuine respect for the stakes. Off the clock, I can't stop building. I'm the founder of StackedUp.finance, a personal finance platform I built from scratch with Claude Code. I run a home lab with self-hosted AI inference, a media stack, and more side projects than my wife has patience for. I've learned these tools the same way I'm going to teach them — by using them, breaking things, and figuring out what actually holds up in production. Outside of work and tinkering, I'm a husband and dad, a drummer, an Anaheim Ducks and Chelsea fan, and a pretty committed home improvement guy. I believe the best coaches are practitioners first — people who are still in the game, still shipping, still learning. That's the kind of coach I want to be for you.
Why do I coach?
I coach because I've lived the gap between "I heard AI is powerful" and "I'm actually using it to build real things," and I know how lonely that middle stretch can feel. Earlier in my career, the mentors who changed my trajectory weren't the ones who handed me answers — they were the ones who sat with me in the messy middle of a hard problem and helped me find the next right move. A senior engineer at my first EV job taught me that shipping beats perfection. A leader at Stryker showed me how to bring calm, structured thinking into high-stakes rooms. I wouldn't be where I am without them. Now I'm watching something wild happen: AI is rewriting what's possible for builders, product people, and leaders — and most of the people I talk to feel a quiet anxiety about it. They've read the blog posts. They've watched the demos. But they haven't had someone in their corner who's actually in the arena with these tools, who can say, "Here's what I tried, here's what broke, here's what I'd do differently." That's what I want to be for the people I coach. Not a guru. Not a hype machine. Just someone a few steps ahead, willing to turn around and offer a hand. If I can help even a handful of people go from stuck to shipping — from curious to confident — that's a career well spent.
Work Experience
Senior R&D Manager, Software - Portfolio Lead Engineer
Stryker
September 2015 - Present
Software Engineer
EV Connect
September 2013 - September 2015
Education
University of California, Riverside
Business Informatics , Computer Science and Business
2009 - 2013