David Balatero
Staff Software Engineer at Cursor
New York, New York, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolDavid Balatero is a staff software engineer with 17+ years of experience building full-stack web products and scaling engineering teams for startups and fast-growing companies. He combines deep Ruby and JavaScript expertise with broad experience across frontend, backend, databases, data pipelines, and ops, backed by a CS degree from the University of Washington. David has led impactful initiatives at Stripe—shipping major Checkout features, custom domain support, and a distributed build cache—and has driven frontend performance and memory savings at Graphite that made large PRs usable. He thrives in early-stage environments, having bootstrapped product incubators, grown teams from scratch, and shipped customer-facing features that measurably boost adoption and throughput. An active open-source contributor, his work spans tooling like Typhoeus and enhancements to Signal Desktop and resque-retry, demonstrating attention to reliability, observability, and developer experience. Based in New York, he prefers hands-on leadership that blends product polish with pragmatic engineering.
17 years of coding experience
19 years of employment as a software developer
B.S., Computer Science, B.S., Computer Science at University of Washington
English, Japanese
Stackoverflow
121reputation
6kreached
0answers
1question
Github Skills (26)
javascript10
resque10
electron10
redis10
compress10
http10
ruby10
autoupdate10
compression10
nodejs10
curl10
testing9
back-end-development9
caching9
configuration-management9
Programming languages (22)
Github contributions (5)
typhoeus/typhoeus
Feb 2010 - Nov 2011
Typhoeus wraps libcurl in order to make fast and reliable requests.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:178 commits in 1 year 8 months
Contributions summary:David primarily contributed to the development of the Typhoeus library, focusing on core features related to HTTP request handling and caching. They implemented the ability to retrieve effective URLs after redirects, added methods to clear cache callbacks, and enhanced the library's internal workings with zlib detection and gzip compression support. Furthermore, the user refactored the request parameters processing and improved overall code maintainability through whitespace adjustments.
libcurltyphoeus
signalapp/Signal-Desktop
Jun 2017 - Jun 2017
A private messenger for Windows, macOS, and Linux.
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:26 commits, 8 PRs, 26 comments in 12 days
Contributions summary:David contributed to various aspects of the Signal Desktop application, including UI improvements, and backend logic. They updated the application's version retrieval, localization messages, and implemented an auto-update dialog. Additionally, the user refactored code to organize files and configurations, ensuring correct build artifact handling and enforcing UI constraints. They modified code related to platform-specific behaviors.
linuxmacoswindows
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