# David Tu > Head of Engineering and Data Location: San Jose, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/davidtu Engineering Manager with 10+ years of technical leadership experience, including hands-on IC background spanning UX, full-stack development, and cloud infrastructure. Track record of scaling teams (7 → 20+ engineers), shipping 7 zero-to-one products in 24 months, and stewarding million-dollar annual budgets at mission-driven organizations. Deep expertise in cross-functional collaboration, engineering culture, and AI/data-driven product delivery. Brings rare design + engineering + people leadership fluency — ideal for a tech org where quality, velocity, and team culture are valued. ## Work Experience ### Director of Engineering and Data (Senior Engineering Manager) @ Advanced Education Research and Development Fund (AERDF) Jan 2025 – Present | San Francisco Bay Area National EdTech R&D Program ($40M funding from CZI, Gates, and Walton) Promoted to oversee total technical strategy, budget, and cross-functional leadership Organizational Transformation: Architected cross-functional "Pod" operating model, dissolving legacy silos to integrate Engineering, Data Science, Product, and Research; scaled org from 7 to 20+ technical professionals: primarily engineers across Product, AI, and Infrastructure disciplines, plus Data Scientists and a Data Manager, managed directly and through an Engineering Manager and Data Manager as direct reports. Strategic Financial Stewardship: Stewarding million-dollar annual budget, managing resource allocation, headcount planning, and delivery prioritization for tools serving 10,000+ users. Efficiency via GenAI: Spearheaded AI Initiatives, reducing assessment development time by 50% and accelerating time-to-stability for new measures by months. Talent Hiring & Development & Retention: Cultivated a "high-agency" culture resulting in zero turnover for key AI/Data leadership over a 2-year period; mentored the Data Manager into an Associate Director. ### Associate Director of Engineering @ Advanced Education Research and Development Fund (AERDF) Jan 2024 – Jan 2025 | San Francisco Bay Area Recruited to build the foundational engineering team and product ecosystem from zero Zero-to-One Product Launch: Directed the end-to-end development of 7 innovative, gamified products and narrative-based dashboards, moving from abstract concept to nationwide production in 24 months. Engineering Rigor: Institutionalized a "Culture of Quality" by establishing automated CI/CD pipelines and E2E testing, ensuring 100% on-time delivery for major school district launches. Scalable Architecture: Designed infrastructure from scratch to support 10,000+ users and capture millions of longitudinal data points per annum from immersive, 30-minute high-engagement sessions. ### Software Engineering Manager @ Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Jan 2022 – Jan 2023 | San Francisco Bay Area Promoted to lead rapid-response, cross-functional teams through critical "Back-to-School" cycles. Strategic Product Pivot: Directed the technical transition from an individual teacher-centric model to a scalable school/site-based architecture; integrated Student Information Systems (SIS) to automate class-level organization, drastically accelerating site-wide onboarding and adoption. Data-Driven Engineering: Partnered with Data Science to institutionalize pre-launch telemetry and logging; established a framework for real-time efficacy measurement of new features. Architectural Mentorship: Empowered Staff Engineers to design a new auth micro-service architecture that became the organizational standard for future development; mentored multiple diverse teams of six to seven engineers. Cross-Functional Leadership: Acted as the primary "connector" between Product, Data, Design, and Engineering to bring clarity to roadmaps during periods of high organizational transition. ### Senior Software Engineer @ Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Jan 2019 – Jan 2022 | San Francisco Bay Area Cloud Infrastructure Optimization: Engineered a 50% reduction in daily AWS S3 writes (millions per day) and optimized Postgres connection pooling for a platform serving 80,000+ students. Disaster Recovery & User Trust: Architected a Web Storage API auto-save mechanism that eliminated data loss; this mitigated 100+ hours of manual support resolution following a major AWS outage. Product Innovation: Improved the feedback cycle between teachers and students by implementing the ability to highlight granular changes in student work between revisions. Tech Stack Modernization: Led transition from a monolithic Ruby on Rails and React to a decoupled micro-services architecture utilizing Remix and Prisma ORM; improved velocity and modularity. ### Tech Lead Software Engineer @ IBM Jan 2015 – Jan 2019 | San Francisco Bay Area Engineering Pivot: Accelerated from UX Design into a lead technical role; hired and directed a 6-member product engineering team to architect a 0-to-1 Watson Education AI platform for K12. Drove application architecture and engineering for IBM Watson Education’s Cloud Platform play from the ground up. Developed and implemented strategy to provide AI services and easily consumable embeddable user experiences to education industry partners. • New AI services by extending Watson capabilities and data analytics through Cloudant/MapReduce • Cloud container/Kubernetes-based micro-service architecture with well documented APIs through Swagger • Continuous delivery through GitHub Enterprise and Travis CI • ReactJS with Jest/Enzyme (automated testing) hosted by NodeJS Hired in and led six-member application development team (and larger extended team) in creating cloud-based cognitive application for educators that is adopted by numerous school districts. Established engineering rigor & best practices, responsive feature delivery through agile methodology, and culture of continuous learning/mentorship. • Innovative product that is unique in marketplace • First release within a year from initial design camp and monthly releases afterwards • AngularJS with Mocha/Chai (automated testing) hosted by NodeJS • Ran agile grooming, planning, scrums, and playback with 2-week sprints Award Strategic Business Unit award received for speed-to-market ### User Experience Designer @ IBM Jan 2006 – Jan 2015 | San Francisco Bay Area Design-to-Engineering DNA: This 9-year foundation in human-centered design directly informs my current ability to architect high-engagement, scalable engineering solutions. Critical member of the IBM Hallmark project for new cloud-enabled database tool, bringing it from inception to mass market adoption. Led the design effort for key product-differentiation feature: simplify the most skill intensive query monitoring and optimization tasks. • Proven to significantly (at least 2x) improve the time-on-task • Appreciable on-going revenue for IBM • Patent issued Led a team of senior designers on a cross-division security-management web and mobile design component. Design pattern and customizable code component adopted by multiple products. Led design for enhancing the ease of use of several high value Enterprise-grade database tooling solutions. • Mockups/wireframes with Adobe Photoshop/Illustrator • Empathy map, user journey, and usability testing • UI prototyping Skills Enterprise Design Thinking Awards Division and organization awards received: • Creating new channel for business requirement gathering • Dramatically improving product up-and-running • Cross functional collaboration to create customer-like environments ### Apple Product Documentation Intern @ Apple Jan 2006 – Jan 2006 Analyzed customer feedback and search patterns for Mac OS X and iApps documentation to improve the the on-screen help search engine. Developed simple PHP/MySQL-based ETL scripts to support on-going month-to-month incremental data analysis. ## Education ### Master's Degree in Education: Learning, Design, and Technology Stanford University Graduate School of Education ### Master of Business Administration (M.B.A.) in Management Information Systems, General USC Marshall School of Business ### Bachelor's Degree in Chemical Engineering University of California, Berkeley, College of Chemistry ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/david-tu-15b35bb3 --- Source: https://flows.cv/davidtu JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/davidtu/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-13