Engineering That Goes Beyond the Screen

Dominik Nowakowski is one of those engineers who needs to understand how things work not only in a CAD model or a simulation, but in the physical world where the machine actually runs. That orientation – toward the real behaviour of real systems under real conditions – has shaped how he approaches engineering work throughout his career and continues to define how he leads projects at GFE Solutions today.

It is a perspective that is easier to describe than to develop. Many engineers build strong technical skills working primarily in software environments, and their work is valuable and competent. But there is a qualitative difference in how an engineer thinks about design decisions when they have personally assembled the machines they designed, watched where the tolerances caused problems during assembly, and stood next to the equipment when it ran for the first time. That difference shows up most clearly when something doesn’t work as expected – and the engineer needs to figure out why.

A Career Built Across Different Engineering Domains

Over the course of his career, Dominik has worked across a wide range of technical domains: robotics, production machinery, internal transport systems, sheet metal processing, hydraulics, and automation. The breadth is not accidental. Engineers who move across domains early in their careers develop a kind of pattern recognition that specialists working in a single area take longer to acquire – an ability to identify structural similarities between problems in different technical contexts and apply solutions that have worked elsewhere.

Early in his career, Dominik also spent a significant amount of time in the workshop assembling machines he had designed. This is increasingly rare. The separation between design and assembly in modern engineering organisations means that most designers never see the physical consequences of their decisions. They receive feedback through documentation – non-conformance reports, assembly notes, commissioning issues – but the feedback is filtered and delayed. Working in the workshop alongside the people building the machines you designed removes that filter. You see directly and immediately what works and what doesn’t, and you carry that knowledge back into the next design.

The result is an approach to engineering work that is consistently practical – oriented toward what will actually function in production, not just what looks correct in the model. Dominik describes it as always asking what happens when the part leaves the CAD environment and enters the real world. That question changes the decisions you make at the design stage.

Leading Engineering Projects at GFE Solutions

At GFE Solutions, Dominik leads engineering projects and supports his team in working through technical challenges in a structured and calm way. The combination of those two qualities – structured thinking and a calm approach under pressure – matters more in a team lead role than is sometimes acknowledged. Engineering projects encounter problems. Schedules slip, requirements change, and technical decisions that seemed clear at the design stage become complicated when the hardware arrives. How a team lead responds to those moments shapes how the rest of the team responds, and ultimately shapes the quality of the work that gets done.

His experience across different industries is directly useful in a role that involves moving between projects in different technical domains. A team lead who has worked only in one area brings deep knowledge but limited adaptability. Dominik’s background allows him to understand the specific requirements of a new project quickly – not because all engineering problems are the same, but because experience across domains develops the ability to identify what is genuinely new about a situation and what has analogues in earlier work.

He is also the kind of engineer who understands that supporting a team means more than reviewing deliverables. It means being available when someone is stuck, asking the right questions to help them think through a problem rather than providing the answer directly, and maintaining the kind of environment where raising a technical concern early is normal and expected rather than something that needs to be justified.

Outside of Work

Outside of work, Dominik spends most of his time with his family. He enjoys bike rides with his kids and building Lego sets together – activities that reflect the same hands-on orientation he brings to his engineering work, just applied to a different context. After intensive project periods, he values the ability to slow down and be fully present somewhere other than in front of a screen.

One of his most distinctive passions is analog photography. He shoots on film, develops the photographs manually, and prints them himself in a darkroom he built together with his father. There is something in that process – the deliberateness of working with a medium that doesn’t allow you to take a hundred shots and select the best one, the physical process of developing and printing, the collaboration with his father in building the space where it happens – that sits naturally alongside how he approaches his engineering work. Careful, hands-on, and interested in how things actually work at the level of the process itself.

He is also fascinated by aviation and is working toward getting his sailplane license – a goal that combines the technical interest in how flight works with the kind of focused, skill-based activity that requires genuine learning rather than just practice. When he gets it, it will not be a surprise to anyone who knows how he approaches most things.