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dgDavid Gray

Open to consulting and interesting problems

I build software for systems that can't fail.

Four years of real-time embedded engineering at Boeing — kernels, schedulers, anti-tamper, code that ships once and has to be right. Plus a second life in applied machine learning, and a master's at Illinois to make it rigorous.

4+ yrs

Shipping mission-critical software

98.8%

Gesture classifier accuracy

10×

Faster integration test cycle

Fewer engineering hours on porting

How I can help

Three kinds of problem I'm genuinely good at

Everything below is work I do now, not work I did once. If your problem looks like one of these, we should talk.

01

Embedded & real-time

Bare metal, RTOS, kernels, schedulers, drivers, and the boring-but-fatal details of timing, portability and anti-tamper. If it has to be right the first time, this is the work I do daily.

02

Applied machine learning

Classifiers and NLP pipelines that ship — data preparation through evaluation through deployment. I care more about the failure modes than the leaderboard.

03

Developer experience

Build systems, CI pipelines, test harnesses and internal tools. Most teams are one good tool away from moving twice as fast, and nobody has time to build it.

Selected work

A few things worth showing

Some of it shipped to production on hardware I'll never see again. Some of it is a side project my wife asked for. Both taught me something.

Professional2021 — present

A processor built from the ground up

Kernel, task scheduler and communication protocol written from nothing, in C and Ada, now in production and distributed globally.

In production. Globally distributed.
CAdaRTOSBare metal
Capstone2021

Sign Language Interpretation System

Control any smart device with American Sign Language — hand tracking, a gesture classifier and grammar correction, wired together over a client-server link.

98.8% accuracy across 14 hand gestures
PythonTensorFlowComputer visionCNN
Research2025

Patient Care Portal Triage

An NLP pipeline that routes patient portal messages to the right team and surfaces relevant evidence-based research while they wait for a human.

Classifies sentence embeddings into care teams, then retrieves supporting research
PyTorchEmbeddingGemmaNLPInformation retrieval

Who you'd be working with

David Gray
St. Louis, MissouriM.S. CS @ UIUC

Engineer. Scientist.
Occasionally underwater.

I'm a software engineer in St. Louis. I spend my working hours on real-time embedded systems at Boeing and the rest of my brain on machine learning, a document platform nobody asked me to build, and a master's degree at the University of Illinois.

Outside of that: scuba diving, rock climbing, hiking, and making things that aren't software. I'm told the common thread is that I like problems where the consequences are real.

More about me

Writing

Notes from the workbench

All posts

Let's connect

Have something hard that has to work?

Contract work, a full-time role, or a problem you want a second opinion on — I read every message and reply to the ones that aren't a template.

Email me

Usually replies within 24 hours · St. Louis, Missouri

ESC

Home

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Copy Email Address

davidgraymi@gmail.com

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Download Résumé

Word document (.docx)

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Play Wordlet

Launch the Flutter word puzzle in browser

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Visit GitHub

github.com/davidgraymi

External

Visit LinkedIn

linkedin.com/in/david-gray-mi

External

A processor built from the ground up

Kernel, task scheduler and communication protocol written from nothing, in C and Ada, now in production and distributed globally.

Professional

Sign Language Interpretation System

Control any smart device with American Sign Language — hand tracking, a gesture classifier and grammar correction, wired together over a client-server link.

Capstone

A system library that runs anywhere

One portable C++ library targeting any RTOS or bare-metal system, packaged with Docker, Bazel and GitLab CI — cutting porting work by 4×.

Professional

Patient Care Portal Triage

An NLP pipeline that routes patient portal messages to the right team and surfaces relevant evidence-based research while they wait for a human.

Research

Bindersnap

GitHub for everyone who doesn't use GitHub — document management, review lifecycle, team collaboration, search and an in-browser editor.

Personal

Wordlet

A word guessing game built in Flutter and compiled to the web — playable right here, no install, no account.

Personal

Reinforcement Learning applied to Tetris

An agent that learns to play Tetris — a genuinely fun excuse to get hands-on with reward shaping.

School

Handwritten digit recognition with weighted KNN

A KNN classifier for handwritten digits, plus a k-value optimizer that collapses repeated distance calculations into a single pass.

School

ID3 mushroom classification

A from-scratch ID3 decision tree that predicts whether a mushroom is edible or poisonous from its attributes.

School

Healthcare length-of-stay estimator

A data mining project predicting how long a patient will stay, from admission-time features.

School

This website

A static site built with Astro, hosted free on GitHub Pages, designed so writing a post costs one markdown file and nothing else.

Personal

I rebuilt this site so that publishing costs one file

The old site was a single 41,000-character index.html. Every change was archaeology. Here is what I replaced it with and why the constraint was maintenance, not design.

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