Dara Afraz
Senior Product Manager, Industrial AI — health, defense, and industrial operations
For 12+ years I have done 🇺🇸 US-based product development for mission-critical use cases in health, defense, and industrial operations. I am a Senior Product Manager at BeyondAI (formerly Beyond Limits), a Caltech / NASA-JPL spinout.
I own Operations Advisor, the platform operators and process engineers use to run heavy industrial plants. A constraint-management reasoner gives them actual-versus-plan guidance and off-target mitigations. The last two years have been a reset from site-specific delivery back onto one product, including taking alerting from zero to one for cases outside the operating plan.
Before that, a joint UCLA and Insight Learning appointment on Department of Defense training systems, including $5M+ in Army and Air Force contracts, and medical training used by 1,000+ students.

Case studies
Selected work
Mission-critical AI, platforms, and operator-facing systems.
All case studies
BeyondAI · Operations · Alerts
Alerting, from zero to one
BeyondAI — there was no alerting for cases outside the operating plan. Took it from zero to one: an event, a recommended action, and a response the operator closes, so a bad instrument does not become…
Case study →

Caltech · BeyondAI · Real-Time Systems
Real-Time Operations UI for Autonomous Racing
Caltech and BeyondAI, 2023–2024. Real-time operations interface for autonomous racing: telemetry a race engineer can trust under latency and high cognitive load.
Case study →
Substack
Recent writing

May 28, 2026 · Substack
How I Unlearned Human in the Loop
I was in a conversation about our platform architecture. Someone said “human in the loop.” Someone else nodded. A third person used the same phrase to mean the opposite thing. Nobody caught it. We did...
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May 5, 2026 · Substack
How I Shamelessly Judge Poor Communicators, Myself Included
You’ve met them. The colleague who speaks often, smoothly, and at length—and somehow leaves no fingerprints on reality. They summarize confidently, the room nods, and ten minutes later you can’t recal...
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Mar 19, 2026 · Substack
How I Own the Communication Layer
Most product managers think their job is to own the product. I've come to believe the more important job is to own the layer underneath it: the communication architecture that determines whether the r...
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Jan 26, 2026 · Substack
How I Moved from Wizards to Agents
The most important question in industrial AI onboarding isn’t “did the import succeed?” It’s “what can the system actually do now—and what’s still missing?”That distinction changed how I think about t...
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