About
Hi, I'm David. I got into this to find out how the magic worked.
It turned out there wasn't any. Starting my career writing kernels and schedulers in C and Ada meant meeting the computer with nothing between us — no runtime, no framework, no safety net, nobody to page at 3am. Every abstraction I'd been quietly grateful for turned out to be somebody's careful engineering, made of the same parts I was now writing by hand.
That has shaped how I work more than any language or framework has. I'm suspicious of things I can't explain to the bottom. I'd rather ship something smaller that I understand completely than something impressive that I'm holding by the handle.
These days that plays out in two directions. During the day it's product security and cloud platform work — Kubernetes, Azure, infrastructure-as-code, service mesh, and the systems that make secure deployment pipelines practical instead of fragile. On evenings and weekends it's machine learning, a document platform I built because my wife had a bad one at work, and a master's in computer science at Illinois to make the ML half rigorous rather than intuitive.
I like problems where the consequences are real. That's true of the software, and apparently it's true of me generally — the hobbies that stuck are the ones where you check your gear before you go.
Experience
Where I've worked
Product Security Engineer
Cloud Infrastructure
Dec 2025 — Present
Lead cloud migration of three software toolchain applications and deliver a live demo that directly contributed to securing the company's share of a $90M contract award. Focused on secure cloud adoption, Kubernetes delivery, and building security into the release process itself.
- Led cloud migration of 3 software toolchain applications and delivered a live demo that directly contributed to securing the company's share of a $90M contract award.
- Architected and deployed cloud infrastructure using Helm charts and Infrastructure-as-Code practices, standardizing application deployments across Azure.
- Configured and operated Istio service mesh for secure inter-service networking within Kubernetes deployments.
- Designed and threat modeled a zero-trust continuous deployment pipeline for Configuration-as-Code and Infrastructure-as-Code delivery to Kubernetes clusters, embedding security review into the release process.
Software Engineer
Boeing
May 2024 — Dec 2025
Secured multi-million dollar military contracts for Boeing's weapon product lines while building tooling to accelerate integration testing and standardize portable platform infrastructure across RTOS and bare-metal systems.
- Secured multi-million dollar military contracts for Boeing's weapon product lines.
- Developed a Go HTTPS server to streamline integration testing, reducing testing time by 10X.
- Created a portable system library for any RTOS or bare metal systems using C++, Docker, Bazel and GitLab, reducing engineering hours by 4X.
Web Developer
Computational Learning Systems Lab
August 2020 — May 2021
Kept the lab's public face accurate: research pages, paper links, and a consistent format through every semester turnover.
- Maintained and updated the lab website and its research listings.
- Validated links to papers and project artifacts so citations actually resolved.
Quality Assurance Analyst
O'Reilly Auto Parts
June 2020 — August 2020
Tested production software and rewrote the SQL underneath the test workflow so results came back fast and correct.
- Optimized SQL queries inherited from a legacy database.
- Reviewed, tested and approved test cases against production software.
- Documented bugs in detail in Jira and Confluence.
Computer Lab Assistant
Missouri State University
September 2019 — May 2021
The person students found when something broke. Two years of translating computer problems into plain English.
- Resolved network, software and hardware issues for students, faculty and lab equipment.
- Wrote documentation so the same problem did not need solving twice.
Research Assistant
Computational Learning Systems Lab
July 2020
Data pipelines for algorithm research — preprocessing, running, and reporting results to the professor and grad students.
- Assisted published work on the effects of t-SNE on traumatic brain injury data.
- Built Python preprocessing pipelines with pandas, scikit-learn and matplotlib.
Background
Education
M.S. Computer Science — Data Science
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
2025 — 2027 · In progress
B.S. Computer Science
Missouri State University
2017 — 2021 · GPA 3.52 · Dean's List 2019, 2020, 2021
Tools I reach for
Systems
AI / ML
Product
Practice
Let's connect
That's the short version
The longer one involves an experimental aircraft, a mushroom classifier, and a word game. Ask me about any of it.
Usually replies within 24 hours · St. Louis, Missouri