David Byron Drake
Engineering leader building AI-native products. Former YC CTO.
Engineering leader with nearly two decades of experience spanning startup CTO and director roles. I build and lead teams that ship production AI systems, full-stack platforms, and developer infrastructure at scale — currently looking for engineering leadership roles where AI strategy and hands-on technical depth both matter.
🎯 Director / VP of Engineering & AI strategy 🌎 Remote-first · Portland-area hybrid 📍 Tigard, OR
GitHub at a glance
LiveExperience
Led three teams (two full-stack + DevOps); drove Agile delivery to 89%, well above the 70% benchmark. Built MCP infrastructure integrating seven platforms across the insurance lifecycle; owned SOC 2 / HIPAA; saved ~$20K/yr with a git-tracked Salesforce CI/CD pipeline.
Leadership · MCP · 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