David Jones
Engineering Manager at Zoox
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolDavid Jones is an engineering manager with 17 years of experience leading teams to deliver polished products, currently based in San Francisco and working at Zoox. A New Zealander in California, he blends hands-on full-stack development roots—notably significant contributions to Ruby/Rails projects like Refinery CMS and the Goliath server—with strategic leadership and startup founding experience. He has founded and led multiple ventures, including ZEN.AI and Off The Back Ltd, giving him an operator’s perspective on product, growth, and technical trade-offs. David’s open-source work shows attention to developer experience and robustness, from Fiber-aware ActiveRecord fixes to CMS UX improvements and RSS/social integrations. He is comfortable moving between backend systems and user-facing improvements, mentoring teams to ship reliable, user-friendly features. Collected technical depth and entrepreneurial grit make him effective at scaling engineering practices in fast-moving product organizations.
17 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor’s Degree, Information and Communication Technologies, Distinction, Bachelor’s Degree, Information and Communication Technologies, Distinction at CPIT (Christchurch Polytechnic Institute of Technology)
English
Github Skills (25)
ruby-rails10
grapesjs10
back-end-development10
rails10
erb10
ruby10
front-end-development10
gr10
html10
activerecord10
refinery-cms10
backend10
ruby-on-rails10
mysql9
rss9
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
refinery/refinerycms
May 2009 - Jul 2021
An extendable Ruby on Rails CMS that supports Rails 6.0+
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:603 commits, 4 PRs, 6 comments in 12 years 3 months
Contributions summary:David contributed significantly to the development of the Refinery CMS, focusing on both backend and frontend improvements. Their work includes fixing grammatical errors in the UI, improving installation instructions, implementing default page parts, enhancing settings views, and adding a public site link to the backend. The user also addressed deletion of spam inquiries and refactored several functionalities, showing a focus on both code quality and user experience.
ruby-on-railscmsrails-cmsrailsrefinery-cms
refinery/refinerycms-blog
Sep 2010 - May 2011
The very best blogging engine for Refinery CMS
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:40 commits in 8 months
Contributions summary:David contributed significantly to the frontend and backend of a blogging engine. They refactored the frontend, separated concerns by introducing partials and a new controller for categories. Furthermore, the user implemented features, including an RSS feed and ShareThis.com integration for social sharing. They also fixed bugs, and added improvements such as publish date functionality.
cmsrefinery-cmsbloggingblogging-enginerefinery
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