David Z. Ye
Software engineer with an eye towards user-centric design, excited by teams with a socially-driven mission.
San Francisco, CA
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Experience
Nodio.fm
2024 — Present
Founder & Engineer
San Francisco, CA
- Building a platform for long-form content in the age of AI, focused on cutting through the noise.
Silver Needle Software LLC
2023 — Present
Founder, Principal Engineer
San Francisco, CA
- Founded software consultancy helping early-stage startups maintain implementation velocity while keeping their engineering team lean.
- Past clients include startups working in healthcare, web3, and AI-based social media.
- Deliverables have included building out analytics pipelines, fixing cloud performance issues, spinning up new customer-facing services and feature development.
Privy.io
2021 — 2023
Founding Engineer
San Francisco, CA
- 2nd hire at Sequoia-backed startup building privacy-preserving infrastructure for web3 companies. Acquired by Stripe in 2025.
- Designed and implemented initial API for user data storage and retrieval, fixed performance bottlenecks, created demos and docs, and built the initial team.
- Product responsibilities included market research, prototyping, and user design as part of the company's successful pivot into the authentication space.
- Full-stack development using Golang for backend and TypeScript for Node and browser packages.
Aurora Innovation
2018 — 2020
Software Engineer, Perception
Palo Alto, CA
- Early engineer on the Perception team working on vision and data infrastructure.
- Led redesign of labeling pipeline to accommodate new target capabilities including long-range perception and right-on-red maneuvers.
Google X Robotics
2017 — 2018
Software Engineer
Mountain View, CA
- Worked on a 10-person software team within a stealth robotics startup in X on robotic planning and simulation.
Gmail Ads, Google
2016 — 2017
Software Engineer
Mountain View, CA
- Worked on ML models for ads targeting based on Gmail data.
- Led the "Similar Audiences" project for targeting an ads audience similar to an input set of audiences.
Twitter
2015 — 2016
Software Engineer, User Modeling
San Francisco, CA
- Built and maintained machine learning models for user modeling, focused on tuning models to match Nielsen data.
Education
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
2011 — 2015
B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
- GPA: 5.0 / 5.0
Teaching
Various Engagements
2015 — Ongoing
- Took a sabbatical from writing software in 2021 to teach English in Spanish secondary schools.
- Taught programming classes as part of Stanford's Code-in-Place program.
- Teaching assistant for the Microcomputer Project Lab (6.115) at MIT.
Skills & Awards
Programming
C++
Golang
Python
TypeScript
React
Awards
- Two-time qualifier for United States American Math Olympiads (USAMO)
- IEEE PES (Power Electrical Society) Scholar
- Intel International Science and Engineering Fair finalist