About Engineer Austin
Engineer Austin is a Texas registered engineering firm in Georgetown that runs IT for small and mid-sized organizations: managed IT, cybersecurity, networks, cabling and fiber, towers and wireless, voice, cloud and custom software, with our team working to standards set by a licensed Professional Engineer.
An engineering firm that runs IT
Most IT providers started as computer shops. Engineer Austin started as an engineering practice that already ran networks.
Our principal has done this work since 1997, starting in internet service provider networks, first on his own and then through Engineer Austin, founded in 2015 as a Texas registered engineering firm. Our senior team members each bring more than twenty years in IT, some longer than the firm itself, across routing, Wi-Fi, servers, cloud, voice, cabling and software. Our public-sector IT work with Texas counties, cities and special districts runs back to 2012.
Today the firm runs IT for organizations from a two-person district office to multi-site networks with hundreds of devices, with in-house system administrators, network specialists, field installation technicians and software developers, plus vetted specialists brought in when a job calls for them. Our team does the work to standards set by a licensed Professional Engineer, and one accountable firm stands behind it.
That combination is the point. An engineer measures before recommending, writes down the design criteria and puts the design on paper. Our team brings that habit to a city hall network, a clinic's firewall or a district's Microsoft 365 tenant, to standards our engineer sets, exactly as a civil engineer brings it to a drainage plan.
The firm exists to join two things that are usually sold separately: infrastructure design held to engineering standards, and hands-on, day-to-day IT management. You get both from one accountable party, with the records to prove it.
At a glance
- Texas Registered Engineering Firm F‑15739
- Team experience in networks and IT since 1997
- Engineering practice since 2007; public-sector IT since 2012
- Texas counties, cities and special districts served for more than a decade
- Approximately fifty organizations under Microsoft 365 management
- 378 sites and more than 1,600 devices on our own UniFi and UISP management servers
- Hands-on experience across Microsoft, Cisco, VMware and MikroTik platforms
- Fully insured; certificates available on request
What we are here to do
Mission
Engineer Austin exists to give small and mid-sized organizations the same disciplined, accountable technology engineering that large ones take for granted: assessed before anything is bought, documented so it can be handed over, secured from day one, and owned by the client.
Vision
To be the firm Central Texas organizations call when technology has to be right the first time and keep being right: a licensed engineering practice that treats IT, networks, cabling, voice and software as one engineered system, and that keeps evolving as fast as the field does.
Values
- Measure first. No recommendation without an as-found record.
- Write it down. Documentation is the deliverable, not the afterthought.
- Proportionate. The fix fits the risk and the budget.
- The client owns it. Tenant, domain, credentials, designs and records stay in your name.
- Accountable. Our team stands behind its work, held to standards set by a licensed Professional Engineer.
- Ever evolving. Standards are revised after every job, and we tell you what changed.
- Honest about limits. We say plainly what we do not do and when a diagnosis was wrong.
Licensed, registered, insured
Texas Registered Engineering Firm F‑15739
Engineer Austin, LLC is registered with the Texas Board of Professional Engineers and Land Surveyors and practices under the Texas Engineering Practice Act. Assessments and modernization plans are prepared and checked by our team to standards set by the P.E. before they are issued. Where Texas law requires a sealed design, our principal is engineer of record; elsewhere the work is designed on engineering principles and held to a professional standard of care.
Insured
Engineer Austin is fully insured. Certificates of insurance and a W-9 are furnished on request, and on each renewal for public entities.
Ready for public-entity procurement
We are registered in SAM.gov and with the Texas Ethics Commission for Form 1295 filings, and we complete Form CIQ on request. Texas public bodies receive terms written for public-entity requirements, set out in a written agreement.
Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider
Microsoft 365 licensing is procured through our Cloud Solution Provider relationship and billed monthly. The licenses, the tenant and the Global Administrator credentials remain your property at all times.
Screened staff
Personnel on public-sector engagements undergo background screening and sign confidentiality agreements. Our staff complete current CJIS Security and Privacy training, renewed annually, are trained on HIPAA requirements, and used to designing networks that keep protected data separated.
Security of our own practice
We run our own shop the way we run yours: MFA on every platform we administer, our remote access tightly restricted, a departing team member's access to client systems removed the same day, client credentials kept out of general-purpose systems and out of the reports we deliver, equipment pre-provisioned before it ships, and no client data in public AI tools.
Our engineering principles
Engineering principles, applied to everything we touch. The values above say what we believe; these eight rules are how we practice them, on a firewall change and a drainage plan alike.
1. Assess before we buy
Every recommendation starts with a documented as-found condition of your network, servers, tenant or site, not with a catalog.
2. Design to stated criteria
We write down what the system must do (capacity, uptime, recovery time, growth, budget) before we choose how, and the design is checked against those criteria.
3. Document as-found and as-left
No change closes without a record of what was there and what is there now, kept under document control.
4. Every change has a rollback
The way back is scripted before the step forward is taken, and a usable restore point is confirmed first.
5. Independent review before release
A second qualified person checks the designs and changes that matter, and the reviewer owns what they approve.
6. The client owns the design
Your data, accounts, credentials and the records of what is installed are yours, in a form another competent firm could pick up. Our scripts, templates and custom configurations are our intellectual property, licensed for your use while you are a client.
7. Held to a standard of care
We hold our work to the standard of care our engineer sets, and we say plainly when something is outside our competence.
8. Proportionate design
The fix is sized to the risk and the budget; a city of three thousand and a plant of three hundred do not need the same thing.
How we keep evolving
A standard nobody revises is a standard nobody is checking. Ours change on a schedule and on evidence, and we tell you what changed.
After every job
Router builds, firewall reviews, domain health checks and report formats follow written house standards. When a job exposes a gap, the standard is revised and the pitfall is recorded with the incident that caused it, so it is designed out for the next client instead of remembered by one person.
Every quarter and every year
Quarterly business reviews fold in what changed on your side and ours: new findings, revised standards, licensing that moved, lessons from other sites that apply to yours. The annual infrastructure assessment re-plans rather than repeats, and the restore procedure is re-verified with your staff.
Platforms re-evaluated every year
We standardize on equipment and services we can support well, then re-check each choice against what the field now offers. That is how Wi-Fi 7 access points, LTE and Starlink failover circuits, immutable backup snapshots and Microsoft 365 security baselines entered our standard build, and how retired platforms left it.
People and tools
Staff train continually on the platforms we manage, including Microsoft, Cisco, VMware and MikroTik, and follow published standards and best practices. New capabilities are added as the work demands them, most recently AI-assisted engineering under written guardrails, and each one arrives with a standard, not just a license.
When a diagnosis turns out to be wrong, we correct it in writing, in the same document, as a dated revision rather than a silent rewrite. You should never have to discover a correction on your own.
Faster hands, the same judgment
We use AI assistants to draft and check configurations and scripts, analyze logs and inventories, and cross-check reports and runbooks, through approval-gated tooling (nothing runs until a person approves it). They make the firm faster and more thorough. They do not make decisions.
Every AI-assisted change is reviewed by a person, logged with a rollback, and approved before it runs. Client secrets are never pasted into public AI tools. A named member of our team reviews and signs off on the result, and that judgment is never delegated to a tool.
For your own organization we offer AI readiness and automation: a use policy, Microsoft 365 Copilot evaluation, data readiness and automation with human review, under the same assess-first, written-approval process.
What you notice
- Faster turnaround on assessments, reports and migrations
- More thorough documentation at the same price
- Staff spending their time on judgment, not typing
- The same standards applied every time, because the checklists are executed, not remembered
How the team is built
We are organized around capability, not headcount. Our team does the work, chosen for the job in front of them, to standards set by one licensed engineer.
In-house roles
- Licensed Professional Engineer (principal; engineer of record where a sealed design is required)
- Senior and junior systems administrators
- Network specialists
- Senior compliance and security specialist
- Helpdesk lead
- Field operations and installation team
- Software developers
- Project management, compliance, accounting and contract administration
Vetted partners and sub-consultants
For work that calls for a specialist, we bring in people we have worked with before, alongside our own Microsoft 365 specialists: additional Microsoft 365 and licensing partners, cabling and fiber crews, telecom and carrier contacts, and, on the civil side, surveying, drainage, floodplain, environmental, structural and geotechnical sub-consultants.
Partners work under our standards and our documentation. Any subcontractor on a client engagement is disclosed and approved in writing first. You still have one accountable firm and one number to call. References from organizations of a similar size and type are available on request, with their permission.
A typical small project pairs an installation technician on site with network specialists configuring remotely, so you pay for one trip rather than several. Equipment is pre-provisioned at our office, with passwords changed and firmware updated, before it ships.
Gregory "Lynn" Haag II, P.E.
President and Principal Engineer
Lynn has worked in information technology since 1997. He started on first-tier phone support at a mid-sized internet service provider and worked his way up to system administrator, which is where he learned that most outages trace back to something nobody wrote down.
He earned a Bachelor of Science in Industrial Engineering from Purdue University, practiced civil engineering under licensed engineers at a Georgetown firm from 2007 to 2011, and became a licensed Texas Professional Engineer in 2013. He has practiced under his own license ever since.
Alongside the IT practice he serves a Central Texas city as on-call City Engineer, reviewing plats and construction plans, administering the floodplain program and putting engineering answers on the record for the council. The principles on this page are not borrowed language; they are how he works every week.
Through Engineer Austin, he and the team have advised law offices, medical practices, CPA firms, retailers, local governments, special districts, engineering firms and internet service providers, including providers across the United States and in Mexico, Panama, Greece and India. He sets the firm's engineering direction and house standards, and the team brings him the questions that need a licensed engineer.
Lynn also consults directly, including P.E. review and certification for public projects: independent technical review of another firm's design or a vendor's proposal, owner's representative on carrier, cabling, tower and municipal contracts, feasibility studies and condition assessments, specifications and procurement support, and on-call engineering advice under a retainer. See IT consulting and assessments and civil and municipal engineering.
He keeps learning, and expects the firm to do the same. The house standards carry his revisions, the AI tooling the firm uses runs under rules he wrote, and when a diagnosis turns out to be wrong, the firm corrects it in writing.
Lynn at a glance
- Licensed
- Texas Professional Engineer, since 2013
- Practice
- Engineering since 2007; IT since 1997
- Education
- B.S. Industrial Engineering, Purdue University
- Disciplines
- Network and systems engineering; civil, water resources and environmental
- Role
- Sets the firm's engineering standards; engineer of record where a sealed design is required
- Current practice
- On-call City Engineer for a Central Texas city, alongside the IT practice
- Speaking
- Cybersecurity and IT best practices, NADL Vision 21, Las Vegas, January 2024
What we do not do
Saying no keeps the yes honest. Four things we are asked for and decline, so you can plan around them.
Security cameras and access control
We do not sell or install cameras, alarms or door-access systems. We design networks that accommodate them, on their own segregated VLAN, and we flag and close any exposure to the internet we find.
Formal compliance attestations
We help you meet HIPAA, CJIS, PCI and CMMC requirements with segmented design, security configuration and training coordination. We do not issue attestations, certifications or legal opinions, and we tell you when an auditor is the right call.
Public-cloud infrastructure design
We do not design AWS or Azure infrastructure. We build on Microsoft 365, on-premises and hosted servers, and our own offsite backup service, and we say when a cloud provider is the better choice for a given job.
Promises we cannot keep
No round-the-clock staffed support, no uptime guarantees, no error-free promises. You get documented response targets, after-hours and emergency response by arrangement, and a plain statement of what cannot be measured.
Platforms we build on
We standardize on equipment and services we can support well, re-evaluate the list every year, and say so when a cheaper option is sound. These are the platforms our staff work with every week.
- MikroTik RouterOS
- Fortinet FortiGate
- Ubiquiti UniFi and UISP
- Zyxel and Nebula
- Microsoft 365, Entra ID and Intune
- Windows Server and Active Directory
- Hyper-V and VMware
- Veeam Backup & Replication
- Synology
- Linux, PostgreSQL and open-source tooling
Where we work
Engineer Austin is based in Georgetown, Texas, in Williamson County. We work on site within about 200 miles of Georgetown and remotely across Texas, the United States and abroad. See our service area.
Most managed-service work is delivered remotely, with on-site visits scheduled when a problem cannot be fixed from the console or when cabling, racks, Wi-Fi or hardware need hands. Equipment ships to you preconfigured. Our clients range from single-office organizations to multi-site networks several hours' drive from our office.
Civil and municipal engineering services are offered throughout Central Texas.
Two practices, one standard
The same firm that runs your network also practices civil and municipal engineering: on-call City Engineer services, plan and plat review, capital improvement planning, drainage, water and wastewater, floodplain administration and grant-funded project administration for Texas cities and districts.
Both practices serve the public. A City Engineer answers a council on the record; an IT assessment is written so a board can budget rather than react. Both run on the same license, the same document control and the same house standards.
How to work with us
Start with a written assessment; the report is yours whether or not you buy anything. How we work sets out the four steps, response targets, a realistic onboarding timeline, what we expect from you and what happens if you leave. When you are ready, request an assessment or call (512) 481-2710.
Start with a written assessment.
Tell us what you have and what is not working. Someone from our team, not a salesperson, replies within one business day by email or phone, and brings in our engineer when your request needs one. The assessment report is yours to keep whether or not you buy anything.