Ryan Merluza
Ryan Merluza, 32
Business unit leader at M Moser Associates
Few have a career as varied and unconventional as Ryan Merluza.
Graduating from high school with a 2.5 GPA left Merluza with few viable options. “I wasn’t gonna get any big scholarships from American colleges,” Merzula said. “I didn’t have the right work ethic and motivation to go to college immediately after high school.”
So he enrolled in the U.S. Navy. Despite his poor high school performance, Merluza didn’t give up on academics. Thanks to his testing skills, he placed into the Navy’s nuclear power program — one of the most academically rigorous in the military. It’s a stint that landed him in Charleston, S.C., upstate New York, Hawaii’s Pearl Harbor, and on a submarine (where he didn’t see the sun for two months).
After the Navy, Merluza completed his engineering education, graduating in 2016 from the New Jersey Institute of Technology summa cum laude.
In the world of design and engineering, Merluza is a rare creature, one who can straddle both fields. “I know a little bit about everything, enough to manage entire engineering systems and coordinate with architects and designers,” he said.
After two years at Syska Hennessy Group, a global engineering and consulting firm, he joined WeWork, where he designed offices for companies such as Puma, Bank of America and BP. He even survived the layoffs that came after the company’s botched IPO in 2020 under the leadership of founder Adam Neumann.
Now at M Moser Associates, managing a team of 16, Merluza is embarking on his biggest project to date. In August, he led the winning proposal to design a 300,000-square-foot office. (He couldn’t discuss any details.)
“There’s a whole bunch of parties involved,” Merluza said. He said he is “making sure that we stay on schedule, making sure that the teams don’t rip each other’s heads off, and we deliver a successful place for a space for our client. So it’s been a very fun challenge.” —J.E.
