Three decades of building systems — now on the owner's side.

Bluefin LLC has been in business since 2019 and has taken more than one form in that time. Today it is a building commissioning and owner's advisory firm serving owners, developers, and contractors across the western U.S.

As President and Founder, Conrad leads Bluefin's commissioning and owner's-representative practice — drawing on more than three decades of MEP engineering experience to help owners get building systems that perform as intended: verified, documented, and delivered on their promise. Working independently on the owner's side of the table, he partners with design and construction teams while keeping the owner's goals front and center.

A career built around building performance

Conrad spent nearly 27 years at PAE Consulting Engineers — joining when it was a single 75-person office and helping it grow over the course of his career. That work capped more than three decades in the industry that began in Canada, where mentors early in his career set him on a path in engineering he never forgot.

Along the way, his work touched some of the most demanding building-performance projects in the Pacific Northwest — including deep experience with the kind of high-performance and living-building work behind projects like the Bullitt Center and the PAE Living Building, along with specialized expertise in water recovery, geothermal, and building-systems integration.

Why Bluefin exists

Across nearly three decades of MEP engineering, the same pattern kept repeating. Commercial buildings are filled with capable systems — HVAC and controls, electrical, lighting, life safety, security — but those systems are designed, installed, operated, and maintained in separate silos. The problems that matter most tend to live in the gaps between them, and those gaps rarely belong to anyone.

The pattern continues after the building opens. A building automation system may carry thousands of points and still not hold what's needed to answer a specific question about how a piece of equipment is performing — trends were never configured, the wrong points were logged, or the system is closed. Commissioning and troubleshooting work routinely meant deploying independent sensors and reconstructing a building's behavior after the fact. Owners face a version of the same problem: most smaller commercial owners carry responsibility for complex and expensive mechanical systems without an engineer on staff to evaluate them.

Bluefin was built to close those gaps rather than add another silo. On the project side, that means independent commissioning and owner's advocacy. On the operating side, it means giving owners an independent way to see what their equipment is actually doing — and a durable record of what it is, how it has been cared for, and whether repairs worked.

What Bluefin stands for

Bluefin exists to give owners an independent advocate for their building systems. We don't produce the design — we make sure the systems the owner is paying for are the systems they actually receive. That means clear requirements up front, honest reviews along the way, rigorous functional testing, and documentation that proves performance at handover and beyond.