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David Gray, home

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 it points at machine learning: measuring what models actually cost to run, building ones that hold up outside a notebook, and a master's in computer science at Illinois to make that rigorous rather than intuitive. The day job keeps me honest about production — product security and cloud platform work on Kubernetes, Azure, infrastructure-as-code and service mesh. And there's a document platform I built because my wife had a bad one at work.

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.

David Gray
Based in
St. Louis, Missouri
Studying
M.S. CS, UIUC
Language
English (native)
Off the clock
Scuba diving, Rock climbing, Hiking, Making art
GitHubLinkedInEmailResume

Experience

Where I've worked

Product Security Engineer

Boeing

Nov 2025 — Present

Secure cloud adoption for software toolchain applications: Kubernetes delivery on Azure, service-mesh networking, and security review built into the release process itself.

  • Led the 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 with Helm charts (configuration-as-code) and infrastructure-as-code, standardizing application deployments across Azure.
  • Configured and operated an Istio service mesh for mutually authenticated service-to-service traffic inside Kubernetes.
  • Designed and threat modeled a zero-trust continuous deployment pipeline for configuration-as-code and infrastructure-as-code delivery to Kubernetes clusters, with security review built into the release process.

Software Engineer

Boeing

Jun 2021 — Nov 2025

Real-time and embedded software for weapon product lines, from the kernel up, plus the tooling that made integration and porting faster.

  • Engineered a processor software stack from the ground up (kernel, task scheduler, communication protocols) in C and Ada for a globally distributed weapon system.
  • Built a Go HTTPS server for integration testing that cut testing time by 10×.
  • Created a portable system library for any OS or bare-metal target with C++, Docker, Bazel and GitLab CI, cutting porting work by 4×.
  • Applied cryptography and anti-tamper design to RTOS software, and Linux depth to cloud build pipelines.
  • Led the engineering effort on a cross-program missile interface application, improving real-time telemetry decoding and control (C#, WPF, XAML).
  • Designed, ran and analyzed requirements-based tests for a formal qualification test event, using a six-degrees-of-freedom simulation and an experimental aircraft.
  • Worked on the engineering behind multi-million dollar military contract wins for the weapon product lines.

Web Developer

Computational Learning Systems Lab, Missouri State

Aug 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.

Undergraduate Researcher

Computational Learning Systems Lab, Missouri State

Jul 2020 — Aug 2020

Data and machine learning pipelines for MRI scans of traumatic brain injuries, feeding published research.

  • Built Python preprocessing and ML pipelines (pandas, scikit-learn, matplotlib) for neuroimaging data.
  • Implemented dimensionality reduction, including t-SNE, and the analysis workflows around it.
  • Produced figures and reports with the graduate researchers for the published paper.

Quality Assurance Intern

O'Reilly Auto Parts

Jun 2020 — Aug 2020

Integration testing against production telemetry, and the SQL underneath it rewritten so results came back fast and correct.

  • Ran integration tests by querying cloud telemetry databases with SQL, and sped up the queries inherited from a legacy database.
  • Reviewed, tested and approved test cases against production software; documented bugs in Jira and Confluence.

Co-founder & Full Stack Engineer

Gurulla

Jan 2020 — Dec 2020

A startup year: iOS and Android SaaS apps, built and shipped by a very small team.

  • Built Flutter apps for iOS and Android on a Firebase backend for data and real-time messaging.
  • Owned the architecture end to end, from the data model to the screens.

Computer Lab Assistant

Missouri State University

Sep 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.

Background

Education

M.S. Computer Science — Data Science

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

2025 — May 2027 · In progress

B.S. Computer Science

Missouri State University

2017 — May 2021 · GPA 3.56 · Dean's List 2019, 2020, 2021

Tools I reach for

Security & cloud

Threat modelingZero-trust deliveryKubernetesIstioHelmTerraformAzureAWS

Systems

CC++AdaRustGoRTOS & bare metalLinuxCryptography & anti-tamper

AI / ML

PyTorchTensorFlowKerasTransformersscikit-learnpandasComputer visionReinforcement learning

Product

PythonTypeScriptVueC#Dart / FlutterDjangoSQL

Practice

BazelDockerGitLab CIJenkinsGitBash
Read my resume

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.

Email me

Usually replies within a day or two · St. Louis, Missouri

ESC

Home

Main landing page & highlights

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Work

All engineering projects & case studies

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Writing

Technical notes & engineering articles

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Games

Browser games, several against real models

Page

About

Background, career timeline & skills

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Contact

Email, inquiries & consultation

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Copy Email Address

[email protected]

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Resume

Web page, with a PDF download

Read

Visit GitHub

github.com/davidgraymi

External

Visit LinkedIn

linkedin.com/in/david-gray-mi

External

Beat the bot

Tetris against the value network from my reinforcement-learning project. Same pieces, two minutes, most lines wins.

Game

Draw a digit

Draw 0–9 and watch a weighted KNN classifier find its nearest MNIST neighbours as you go.

Game

Is it poisonous?

A real mushroom from the UCI dataset. Make your call, then watch an ID3 decision tree make its own.

Game

Route the robots

Draw a warehouse, place robots and goals, and race a LaCAM multi-agent path-finding solver to the shortest plan.

Game

Daily Wordlet

One five-letter word a day, the same for everyone. Six guesses.

Game

Bot or human?

14 rounds. One line from a public-domain classic, one written by a language model. Spot the bot.

Game

Reaction test

Wait for the panel to light up amber, then hit it as fast as you can.

Game

Lost signal

The 404 page's dodge game. Packets rain down; steer the receiver out of the way.

Game

neural-cost

A framework-neutral Python library that tells you how fast a neural network should run, not just how fast it does — FLOPs, tensor traffic and a roofline model across PyTorch, JAX and TensorFlow.

Personal

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

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

Threat modeling a zero-trust deployment pipeline

A continuous deployment pipeline for configuration-as-code and infrastructure-as-code into Kubernetes, designed from its threat model outward so the release process does the security review.

Professional

Moving three toolchain apps to Kubernetes on Azure

Three toolchain applications moved to Kubernetes on Azure, deployed one way with Helm and infrastructure-as-code, and secured with an Istio service mesh.

Professional

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

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

LaCam for Multi-Agent Path Finding

A from-scratch LaCam solver for CS440 — agents searching a space of joint configurations, each expanded by a constraint tree that rules out collisions and swaps.

School

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

An Unexpected Email, REPRO-SIGN, and 11 Citations on Google Scholar

Years after our college capstone, an out-of-the-blue email from European AI researchers wanting to reproduce our sign language paper sent me to Google Scholar, where we've been cited 11 times.

Post

Connecting the Dots: How a Sign Language Capstone Got Me Hooked on AI

Looking back at my senior capstone project at Missouri State — building a real-time American Sign Language smart home controller with MediaPipe, custom CNNs, and networking — and how it sparked my path in machine learning.

Post

GPU vs. CPU: Roofline Benchmarks on Apple Silicon MPS with neural-cost v0.2.0

The neural-cost v0.2.0 GPU benchmark moves from CPU roofline analysis to Apple Silicon's MPS GPU backend — measuring PyTorch and JAX across five architectures, four batch sizes, and both eager and compiled execution modes.

Post

PyTorch vs. JAX vs. TensorFlow: A Roofline Benchmark Across 5 Architectures

An empirical investigation comparing PyTorch 2.14, JAX 0.11, and TensorFlow across five model architectures and four batch sizes, measuring compiler speedups, kernel overheads, and hardware limits on Apple Silicon.

Post

neural-cost: Roofline Analysis Across PyTorch, JAX, and TensorFlow

A framework-neutral Python library that estimates a neural network's FLOPs and tensor traffic, measures its runtime, and uses a roofline model to tell you exactly where performance is being left on the table.

Post

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.

Post
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