CURRICULUM VITAE
David is a technology generalist professionally, dedicated to staying current with best practices and design patterns. He is also a team player and a world traveler.
WORK EXPERIENCE
CacheQ Systems, Inc. / Remote from Tauranga, New Zealand
Member of Technical Staff : 2024 – Present
Software Architect for several projects, all targeting AI / ML inference and specific GPU chips. This includes developing a product that sends PyTorch workloads to the cloud, a compiler pass to optimize tensor sharding (with C++ / MLIR), plus methods to optimize the maths and on-chip memory to accelerate LLM attention.
Recent certifications: AWS Machine Learning, AWS Solutions Architect, and CompTia Security+.
Inland Revenue Department / Wellington, New Zealand
Consulting Principal Enterprise Architect : 2012 – 2013 (18 month contract)
Principal Solution Architect for New Zealand's tax department.
Responsible for delivering solution designs for all I.T. change projects such that they aligned with enterprise strategy.
Member of the Enterprise Architecture Leadership Team.
Matrix-managed up to 15 Enterprise Solution Architects.
Co-chair of the Enterprise Architecture Council.
Chair of fortnightly meetings with the Principal I.T. Consultants (operations team).
De-facto Security Architect, and author of the Information Security Reference Architecture document.
Implemented significant improvements to the Solution Architecture process.
Solnet Solutions Ltd.
/ Wellington, New Zealand
Senior Consultant : 2010 - 2012
For NZ's Inland Revenue Department, before being promoted to the Principal Architect role described above, David designed the system for taxpayers to opt-in for email notifications by topic. This project delivered the strategic Party Management Application (including a domain model for Identity) plus a new Service-Oriented framework.
For the Accident Compensation Corporation, David designed the eGateway, a web service for health-care providers to submit forms over a secure channel. David led the development team. Shortly after the delivery of this project, Solnet won an ACC tender to become its "eChannel and Integration Services" supplier.
Jade Software Corporation Ltd. / Christchurch, New Zealand
Delivery Manager New Zealand : 2008 - 2009
David managed software development teams ala Prince2 for Jade customers such as Fonterra, Air New Zealand, the Warehouse, and the University of Canterbury. He was Scrum Master for the Enterprise Risk Assessor and Investigator products. He also consulted for Arc Innovations on the Advanced Metering Infrastructure program as an agile coach and Java instructor.
Software
Federation, Inc. ( SFI )
/ Colorado, USA
Co-Founder / Principal Partner and Consultant
: 1996 - 2007
Sales and contract negotiations, but mostly hands-on consulting for SFI clients.
SFI
Client: Xilinx, Inc. / Colorado, USA
Principal Consultant : 2007
Introduced VMware Enterprise technology to Xilinx's Computer Farm Services group.
Latis
Networks, Inc. (Still Secure) / Colorado, USA
Director
of Product Engineering : 2006
Project manager and technical lead for the Cobia Unified Network Platform, designed to integrate open-source TCP/IP components (router, DNS, DHCP, Firewall, ...) with a great browser interface. David brainstormed requirements, recruited team members, designed the software, led the agile team, and coded core infrastructure.
SFI
Client: National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR / UCAR)
/ Colorado, USA
Principal Consultant : 1997 - 2003 (various roles)
Recipient of NCAR / UCAR's 2001 Outstanding Accomplishment Award for Scientific and Technical Advancement - for the 4DWX project (Four Dimensional Weather Engineering), a comprehensive suite of state-of-the-art tools for meteorologists. As the Software Engineering lead, David led an agile effort to redesign the system to make it scalable and modular (this involved lots of pair programming in Java, a great way to mentor the team).
Primary consultant for an enterprise-wide business-process re-engineering effort, creating analysis models that were used to identify operational inefficiencies.
Invited lecturer on Commercial Middleware for a workshop on I.T. strategy.
University
of Colorado (CU - Boulder)
Department
of Computer Science, Faculty / Lecturer : 1999 - 2002
Division
of Continuing Education : 1997 - 1998
Course author for CSCI 4448: Object-Oriented Programming and Design. Topics include: Java, C++, UML, OO design patterns, multi-threaded concurrency, databases, architecture, and (agile) project management. Software Engineering in the wild.
The lecture notes are online as PDF files: www.Leberknight.com/csci4448.html
Here's an example JavaScript program with which you can create Fractal Art.
David also taught Advanced C++ evening classes for adults.
Early Career / Colorado, USA
Consultant and Software Engineer : 1987 - 1997
SFI Client: IGW N.V. - Created Java applets to play casino games for real money.
SFI Client: Level (3) Communications - Middleware development.
SFI Client: Avitek, Inc. - Middleware development.
SFI Client: Janus I.H.C. – Taught classes for Java, C++, and agile project management, along with design consulting for multiple projects.
SFI Client: Lucent Technologies - Re-implemented the manual router for the FPGA CAD editor, along with other improvements to the C++ code.
Bolder Heuristics, Inc. - Consulting engineer for many clients including Storage Technology Corp, Health Decisions LLC, and USWest Knowledge Base Group.
NeoCAD, Inc. (acquired by Xilinx, now AMD) - FPGA CAD software in C++.
Carnegie Mellon University (CLARIT project) - Linguistic analysis of text.
Daisy / Cadnetix, Inc. - Printed-circuit-board CAD router software in C.
OTHER ACHIEVEMENTS
David is a member of the World Footbag Hall of Fame.
He has been to more than 80 countries, including some epic adventures. Check out his Travel Blog.
He speaks Spanish and Portuguese fluently, plus intermediate French.
EDUCATION
M.S.
in Computational Linguistics, Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Artificial intelligence and linguistics, applied to machine 'understanding' of natural languages.
B.S.
in Electrical Engineering, Cornell University "With Distinction"
Ithaca, New York
Advanced courses in computer architectures and semiconductor (quantum) physics.
This CV in PDF format: leberknight_cv.pdf
David's home page: www.LEBERKNIGHT.com