Recommendations

DVC has been a trusted advisor of mine for over a decade. He’s been an invaluable addition to my senior engineering leadership teams, both in full time roles (WeWork, Optimizely) and more recently in his “architect-as-a-service” consulting role (Pave, Great Expectations).

He’s a great all-around engineer and human being, but I will mention a few superpowers:

DVC has the ability to partner both with management and also IC engineers and gain the trust of both. This is rare in organizations. He’s an engineer at heart but understands the management domain well enough to “be in the room” for any conversation. 

DVC excels at “stepping back” to look at the big picture, and asking seemingly simple questions that provoke critical thinking. Often you think, “It can’t be that simple can it? He’s oversimplifying” and then you realize he’s onto something. 

DVC is as forward thinking as they come. Often, someone with this level of experience will be anchored in a few things that worked well for them, and appear stuck in their ways. DVC is always looking at how our craft is evolving (e.g. his recent deep exploration of LLM-based dev tools) while also being able to see cyclical patterns in the industry.

If you have a chance to involve him in your engineering organization, take it! You won’t regret it.

Lawrence Bruhmuller, Senior VP of Engineering, Great Expectations

Working with DVC was my first experience working with an "architect-as-a-service." When I started as a senior engineering manager at Great Expectations, I was skeptical of the value of such a role. However, in a short time, I came to appreciate DVC's outsized positive impact on our company, product, leadership team, and me. He's amazing!

DVC is adept at getting to the heart of the matter on specific topics, whether technical or people-related. He asks incredibly insightful questions and leverages first principles to establish context quickly. With this context, he provided perspectives that were not prescriptive, helped to refine my understanding, and drove progress. He is both highly efficient and extremely effective in his collaborations. 

DVC also helped us better understand the bigger picture in which we were operating. As he collaborated with multiple people at various levels across the org, he could connect dots in unique and powerful ways.

Going forward, in all organizations I join, I'll be advocating for employing "architect-as-a-service" and DVC, specifically.

Martin Hertz, Senior Engineering Manager, Great Expectations 

I had the privilege of working with David while he was a software architecture consultant for Justworks. 

David helped level up our engineering organization through his presentations and his one-on-one coaching of staff engineers. As a new staff engineer, I benefited from David's guidance on how to navigate the ambiguity of the role, align with the priorities of leadership at the company, and prioritize technical investments. 

For Justworks engineering as a whole, David provided expert guidance on domain-driven design, event-driven architecture, GraphQL, and AI. 

I would be thrilled to work with David again in the future.

Chris Heydt, Staff Engineer, Justworks, Inc.