David Williams-king
Research Manager at Youtuber
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolDavid Williams-king is a Research Manager and technical AI safety specialist with 15 years of experience bridging systems security research and applied engineering. He holds a PhD from Columbia focused on binary transformation techniques—work that produced widely-cited systems like Shuffler and Egalito—and has translated that deep systems expertise into leadership roles across startups, academia, and research institutes. Currently at ERA and a MARS research visitor, he leads projects on chain-of-thought faithfulness, jailbreak techniques, and governance-focused safety research while also mentoring fellows on rigorous code and research practices. As a former CTO and cofounder of a cyber-insurance/security startup, he combines product-minded engineering leadership with hands-on SRE and infra work. He runs a popular anonymous YouTube channel on AI safety with 30K+ subscribers, signaling an unusual knack for public-facing technical communication alongside peer-reviewed research. Based in Montreal, he is known for tightening research teams’ development practices and turning systems-security ideas into reproducible, deployable artifacts.
15 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science (M.Sc.) Computer Science -- Systems, Master of Science (M.Sc.) Computer Science -- Systems at The University of British ColumbiaDoctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Computer Science Systems & Security, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Computer Science Systems & Security at Columbia UniversityB.Sc. Honours Computer Science, B.Sc. Honours Computer Science at University of Calgary
Github Skills (110)
instrumentation10
security10
speech10
hosting10
jtag10
capstone10
location10
x86-6410
glibc10
x8610
speech-to-text10
sqf9
ctc9
unicorn9
voice9
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
dwks/aenea-grammar-simple
Sep 2015 - Oct 2021
Simple voice recognition grammar for coding on Linux.
Contributions:14 commits, 1 PR, 2 pushes in 6 years 2 months
voice-recognitiongrammarlinuxrecognitionvoice
columbia/egalito
May 2016 - Oct 2021
Self-hosting binary instrumentation framework for security research
Contributions:668 commits, 1 PR, 7 pushes in 5 years 5 months
hostinginstrumentationsecurity-toolssecurity-researchsecurity
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