Daniel Westendorf
Chief Innovation Officer
McCall, Idaho, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolDaniel Westendorf is a seasoned technology leader and Head of Innovation with 15 years of experience building cloud-native systems, leading engineering teams, and driving AI adoption across product, sales, and marketing. He has progressed from hands-on roles in system and network administration to founding a startup and directing cloud engineering, bringing practical operational depth to strategic architecture. At Huntress he moved rapidly through Principal and Chief Architect roles into a company-wide innovation remit, demonstrating an ability to translate research and prototypes into cross-functional initiatives. He contributes to open-source, notably improving Searchkick’s handling of non-integer primary keys and reindexing logic, underscoring attention to edge cases and robust back-end test automation. Based in McCall, Idaho, Daniel blends entrepreneurial grit with enterprise-scale delivery, often tackling thorny integration and data-migration problems that others overlook. He’s known for pairing technical rigor with a knack for spotting product-forward AI opportunities that accelerate business impact.
16 years of coding experience
18 years of employment as a software developer
Associate's degree, Information Technology, Associate's degree, Information Technology at University of Phoenix
Stackoverflow
3,415reputation
114kreached
140answers
4questions
ruby-on-rails
top-5%
Github Skills (20)
ruby-rails10
back-end-development10
amazon-elasticsearch10
testing10
rails10
ruby10
elasticsearchquery10
aws-elasticsearch10
elasticsearch10
test-automation10
elasticsearch-api10
ruby-on-rails9
activerecord9
macos6
amazon-s36
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
ankane/searchkick
Jun 2017 - Jul 2017
Intelligent search made easy
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Test Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & Test Automation EngineerContributions:5 commits, 1 PR, 6 comments in 7 days
Contributions summary:Daniel focused on improving the test suite and handling primary key types within the searchkick library. They added a failing test for models with non-integer primary keys, and then implemented a solution to reindex records with non-numerical primary keys in batches. They also made changes to simplify the Sku model and correctly passed batch IDs. Their work primarily revolved around ensuring the library correctly handles various primary key types and improves the reindexing process.
pythonrailsintelligent-searchsearch-engineopensearch
danielwestendorf/specwrk
Jul 2025 - Dec 2025
Parallel test runner for rspec. Multi-process and multi-node.
Contributions:1 review, 109 PRs, 129 pushes in 5 months
multi-processrspectest-runner
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