Dave Nelson
Staff Engineering Manager at Lorikeet
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolDave Nelson is a delivery-focused Staff Engineering Manager based in Sydney with 19 years of engineering experience and 7+ years leading high-performing teams across platform, mobile and product domains. He combines hands-on software craftsmanship (Java, Spring, React/TypeScript, AWS and event-driven architectures) with pragmatic delivery leadership, recently rebuilding Canva’s Design School into a global, personalised education platform serving 1M+ daily page views at 99.99% availability. A Theory Y leader and coach, he scales teams through recruitment, mentoring and embedded Agile practices while also training emerging leaders via internal coaching programs. His background spans infrastructure and big-data systems through to mobile and serverless platforms, giving him a rare fluency in both reliability engineering and product-driven roadmaps. Notably, he often steps into 2IC or acting-head roles, bridging technical vision and stakeholder alignment to turn complex requirements into practical, measurable outcomes.
19 years of coding experience
25 years of employment as a software developer
Masters, Applied Linguistics, Masters, Applied Linguistics at Macquarie UniversityMasters, Information Technology, Masters, Information Technology at University of Technology Sydney
Github Skills (3)
react1
filter1
dashboard1
Github contributions (5)
lardawge/goldberg
Feb 2007 - Jul 2008
Contributions:35 commits in 1 year 4 months
dave-nelson/clavis
Dec 2012 - Apr 2018
Contributions:29 commits, 1 push in 5 years 4 months
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