David Ellis
Co-Founder at WisdomQ
Austin, Texas, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDavid Ellis is a founder and senior engineering leader with 11 years of experience building scalable backend systems, distributed runtimes, and developer-facing infrastructure. He co-founded multiple startups—most recently WisdomQ—and served as CTO at Alan Technologies where he led ambitious projects including a novel parallel programming language and IaSQL, an infrastructure-as-data system that treats AWS as Postgres tables. At Uber he contributed to core dispatch, surge pricing, and the H3 hexagonal spatial index (with bug fixes and QA for h3-py), demonstrating a mix of low-level systems engineering and pragmatic product focus. David prefers early-stage, hard-problem work—designing for growth and removing architectural debt—but moves on once software reaches predictable maturity. Based in Austin, he combines deep technical curiosity with a bias toward clarity, automated testing, and measurable operational improvements.
11 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Arts (M.A.), Electrical Engineering, Master of Arts (M.A.), Electrical Engineering at Central Florida (UCF)Bachelors, Computer Engineering, Bachelors, Computer Engineering at University of Central Florida
English
Github Skills (12)
c1710
algorithms10
gis10
geospatial10
c1110
python10
testing10
data-structure9
algorithm9
data-structures9
pytest7
numpy5
Programming languages (18)
Github contributions (5)
uber/h3
Jan 2018 - Jan 2022
Hexagonal hierarchical geospatial indexing system
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:384 reviews, 90 commits, 38 PRs in 4 years
Contributions summary:David's contributions focused on refactoring and removing code, specifically related to removing `H3IndexFat` from the codebase and removing references to the `H3IndexFat` data structure throughout the `algos` package and several applications. The commits show a clear intent to simplify the code and remove dependencies. Additionally, the user fixed a typo in a testing file.
hexagongeospatialspatial-indexingindexinghierarchical
uber/h3-py
Aug 2018 - Jan 2019
Python bindings for H3, a hierarchical hexagonal geospatial indexing system
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & QA Engineer
Back-end Developer & QA EngineerContributions:49 reviews, 9 commits, 3 PRs in 5 months
Contributions summary:David primarily focused on fixing bugs and improving the `hex_ranges` method within the Python `h3` library, which is the core functionality. Their work involved debugging and refactoring the algorithm for calculating hexagonal ranges, addressing grouping issues and correcting calculation logic. Additionally, the user wrote and expanded the test suite, demonstrating a focus on quality assurance by including more test cases and numerical verification. The contributions resulted in improved accuracy and reliability of the hexagonal indexing system.
geospatialpythongeocodingpython-bindingsindexing
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