Jason Duncan is the Engineering Group Manager for Oceaneering’s Manufactured Products Group in Houston, Texas. A mechanical engineer by trade, Jason has been with Oceaneering for eight years.
A proud alumnus of Prairie View A&M University, Jason has spent his entire career in engineering in the oil and gas industry at various companies. “A lot of my time has been spent as a research and development engineer, as I have a passion for new products.”
He describes his path to his current role as going from a young design engineer doing calculations and overnight testing, to a senior project engineer working on new developments, to jumping over to a leadership path where he manages a diverse group of engineers while serving as a leader within his business unit.
As Engineering Group Manager, Jason is in charge of three engineering segments that work on new product development, subsea umbilical termination hardware, and pipeline connection hardware. The equipment that the groups deliver are typically pressure-containing or hydraulic controls.
“The types of requests that we get range from urgent pipeline repair design requests that have to be completed in days to weeks, to multi-year subsea field developments where the design effort alone can take one to two years.”
In addition to delivering quality products to solve customer’s problems, Jason is excited by the people he works with and the challenges they overcome together. “I have a great team of highly intelligent, highly driven engineers that I get to work with, and we get opportunities to try to solve the unsolvable every day. That’s what gets me up in the morning.”
Although he enjoys his work, maintaining a balance between his work life and personal life is critically important. “I’m someone who doesn’t mind going to work at midnight or 3:00 in the morning, but I refuse to miss my son’s ballgame.”
He encourages his team to keep boundaries as well. “The phrase I use with them all the time is ‘your time is your time.’ It’s just my way of reiterating to them that boundaries are important.”
He advises engineers interested in joining the company to make sure they are passionate about their chosen career path.
“If you have passion behind what you do, you don’t feel like you’re really working. And to me, the great thing about working at a place like Oceaneering is that they reward people who work hard and are passionate about their job.”