Michael Yoder joins Bailey as Director of Technology.
Michael Yoder has joined Bailey as our Director of Technology. He brings 15 years of civil engineering experience and an active Idaho PE license to the part of the work where technology has to earn trust: standards, calculations, plan quality, review risk, constructability, and professional judgment.
Bailey is building better technology around civil engineering, but the useful part is not speed by itself. The useful part is better quality control: clearer assumptions, cleaner plan sets, earlier risk signals, and stronger human review before a project reaches the expensive decision point. Michael's role is to keep that technology grounded in engineering reality.
Who Michael is
Michael Yoder brings Bailey a civil engineering background that spans hydraulic, civil, transportation, and construction inspection projects. He has worked through the full design process, from project intake and survey coordination to modeling, quantity takeoffs, cost estimating, specifications, and plan/spec/estimate delivery.
His software background includes AutoCAD Civil 3D, Bluebeam, MicroStation, InRoads, OpenRoads, Bentley FlowMaster, ArcGIS, FHWA Hydraulic Toolbox, and HY-8. That matters because Bailey's technology work is not happening outside the engineering workflow. It is being built inside the same tools, drawings, comments, and review cycles that determine whether a project can move.
Why this role matters now
Technology can make a firm faster. It can also make a firm confidently wrong if the checks are weak. In civil engineering, that distinction is everything. A polished output is not the same as a reliable assumption, and a faster workflow is not valuable if it moves a mistake farther downstream.
Michael's job is to keep Bailey's systems pointed at the practical questions engineers and reviewers actually care about:
- Do the assumptions match the standard? Drainage, grading, utilities, access, and constructability all depend on rules that have to be checked, not guessed.
- Did the review comment become a plan-set change? Agency expectations only protect the project if they are carried back into the drawings and verified.
- Can a professional engineer trust the path? Technology should surface context, conflicts, and open questions sooner so the human technical decision gets better, not thinner.
Where Michael fits at Bailey
Bailey's intelligence-driven work now has three practical lanes. Aaron Sperry focuses on planning: entitlement context, jurisdictional patterns, and the process steps that shape early project decisions.
Ryan Benson focuses on systems, process, and knowledge management: capturing what Bailey learns, structuring it so it can be reused, and connecting the workflows that keep information from disappearing into one inbox or one meeting.
Michael focuses on engineering quality. He is the technical check on the technology layer, making sure the tools Bailey builds stay grounded in standards, calculations, plan quality, review risk, constructability, and the judgment a professional engineer would actually trust.
What this means for clients
For developers and municipalities, the benefit is not a louder claim about AI. The benefit is a cleaner project record and a better review path. When assumptions are visible earlier, conflicts surface sooner. When comments stay connected to drawings, plan sets get cleaner. When engineering judgment stays in the loop, technology becomes a quality tool instead of a shortcut around the hard part.
That is the point of Michael's role at Bailey: use modern systems to protect the work that still has to be done by people who understand the site, the standard, the agency, and the construction path.
We're glad to have him.
Read Michael's full bio, see the rest of the team, or start a conversation about a specific site.
