David Byron Drake
Senior Engineering Manager · New Relic
I’m a Senior Engineering Manager at New Relic, with nearly two decades of experience across engineering, startup leadership, and building software at scale. I care about helping people grow, understanding the problems behind the requests, and building teams that deliver useful software.
📍 Tigard, OR
GitHub at a glance
LiveSelected writing
More on randomdrake.com ↗Empathy as a Trait for Good Developers
How listening, curiosity, and understanding someone else’s needs lead to more useful software.
Read essay ↗ Work & life ·Never Going Back – A Week of Not Eating Lunch at My Desk
A small change in daily habits, and what it taught me about focus, enjoyment, and owning my time.
Read essay ↗ Teaching & entrepreneurship ·Tomodachi – Entrepreneurship in the Face of the Great East Japan Earthquake
Sharing the possibilities of building a business with Japanese students visiting a Silicon Valley startup.
Read essay ↗Experience
Led three teams (two full-stack + DevOps); drove Agile delivery to 89%, well above the 70% benchmark. Owned SOC 2 / HIPAA; saved ~$20K/yr with a git-tracked Salesforce CI/CD pipeline.
Leadership · Delivery · SOC 2 / HIPAALed teams of up to 15 engineers across three countries on a large-scale supply-chain platform (Go, Angular/TypeScript, AWS, Kubernetes). +60% on-time delivery, −50% support load.
Go · Angular · AWS · KubernetesSecured receipts across six stacks (C++, PHP, Java, iOS, Android, JS), moving millions of dollars daily and handling thousands of requests per second at Super Bowl–scale traffic.
High-scale · Multi-stackLed a 17-person team across HR, sales, and engineering. Built an open product-data platform — tens of thousands of catalogued products and a public API used by 400+ developers — scaling to 10M hits/month on a single server and an $8.6M valuation.
Founder · Open API · ScaleCTO over the company; built a pioneering dispatch system coordinating 400+ technicians nationwide and drove a ~30% increase in conversion.
YC · Marketplace · Ops