David Leary

| linkedin.com/in/david-leary

Summary

Technical product leader with 15+ years translating complex engineering problems into product strategy and shipped outcomes. Rare combination of deep technical fluency — hands-on with Kubernetes, Terraform, distributed systems, and blockchain — and MBA-trained business acumen for roadmap prioritization, stakeholder alignment, and go-to-market execution. Proven track record of defining product vision in ambiguous environments, writing specs and technical requirements that engineering teams can execute against, and driving cross-functional delivery across engineering, design, and business stakeholders. Passionate about crypto and the future of the financial system.

Core Competencies

Experience

Turnkey

Technical Product Lead | September 2025 – Present

• Joined as the first hire beyond cofounders, defining the technical product direction, engineering processes, and development culture from the ground up
• Drove the product decision to expand from single-region to multi-region, defining requirements for replication strategies that reduced latency and improved availability for end users
• Identified critical performance bottlenecks on the hot path and led the evaluation and introduction of additional database solutions, balancing throughput needs against operational complexity
• Established the company's inaugural engineering processes and quality standards, creating the rituals and workflows that accelerated team velocity
• Evaluated and integrated AI-assisted development tooling into team workflows, improving cycle time for architecture reviews, documentation, and code review

Irreducible

Head of Infrastructure & Product Operations | September 2024 – August 2025

• Served on the executive team for a zero-knowledge startup, contributing to company strategy, product-market fit exploration, and investor presentations
• Authored and implemented ADRs, RFCs, and structured approval workflows — creating the decision-making framework the engineering organization used to evaluate and prioritize technical investments
• Designed and rolled out an engineering leveling and evaluation framework, defining clear expectations for performance, growth, and promotion across all teams
• Defined the product requirements and roadmap for the infrastructure platform, establishing four core pillars: infrastructure, observability, CI/CD, and developer tooling
• Drove observability product decisions — selecting OpenTelemetry, Grafana, and Perfetto as the stack and defining the integration requirements across GitHub Actions CI/CD pipelines
• Led build-vs-buy evaluation for compute orchestration, ultimately driving the decision to build a proprietary layer for FPGA-accelerated clusters based on unique product requirements

Chainlink Labs

Engineering Manager – Infrastructure Platform | September 2022 – September 2024

• Transformed the platform team's operating model from reactive DevOps to a product-oriented platform team, defining a self-service product vision with clear interfaces, documentation, and SLAs
• Established SLAs with defined SLOs and accountability metrics for the platform offering — the first formal product-level commitments for internal infrastructure
• Led the vendor evaluation and business case for migrating Chainlink's observability stack in-house from Grafana Cloud, delivering greater than $3 million per year in cost savings
• Defined the product roadmap for observability improvements, prioritizing OpenTelemetry collectors and distributed tracing based on developer pain points and incident data
• Drove the requirements and rollout of a zero-trust network solution for external access, working across security, engineering, and operations stakeholders to eliminate VPN overhead
• Conceived and shipped Chainlink's first service catalog, providing a single source of truth for service ownership, dependencies, and operational metadata
• Led cross-team efforts to define identity and access management requirements across custom platforms and licensed SaaS products, aligning multiple stakeholder groups on a unified approach
• Partnered with the DECO team to define production-readiness requirements for Chainlink's zero-knowledge product, bridging research and engineering priorities

Code and Theory

Technical Director | July 2021 – July 2022

• Identified the web3/crypto market opportunity and led C&T's expansion into blockchain-based products, defining the technical strategy and delivery capabilities from scratch
• Served as technical product lead for Jam City's play-to-earn Ethereum game, driving the product from conception through NFT drop and CMS selection — including smart contract scope definition and audit coordination
• Defined and delivered a reusable DevOps platform strategy for the agency, enabling rapid onboarding and parallel delivery across multiple concurrent client engagements
• Managed technical product delivery for global brands including Adidas, Amex, Washington Commanders, Corning, CNN, and Mars — translating client requirements into technical specifications and coordinating cross-functional teams to deliver on time
• Championed organization-wide code quality standards, defining the engineering guidelines for web applications and infrastructure across Node, TypeScript, React, and Terraform

Merkle

Director of DevOps | October 2019 – July 2021

DevOps Engineer | May 2019 – October 2019

• Defined the containerization and Kubernetes adoption roadmap across all five of Merkle's core platform components, prioritizing migration order and managing cross-team dependencies
• Owned the DevOps product offering supporting twenty-two accounts across dev, stage, and production — balancing competing priorities from multiple internal stakeholders
• Drove build-vs-buy decisions and vendor evaluations for CI/CD tooling, infrastructure-as-code frameworks, and deployment automation across numerous cloud environments
• Defined requirements and led delivery of new tooling and compute platforms for data science teams, translating researcher needs into infrastructure products
• Established regulatory compliance and security standards, working with legal and engineering to define policies that met ISO, SOC, and NIST requirements

Apex Clean Energy

Engineering Manager | January 2015 – May 2019

IT Systems Administrator | February 2013 – December 2014

• Defined the product vision and led delivery of the remote operations and control center (ROCC), a monitoring platform that integrated over $3 billion in wind and solar assets with real-time telemetry
• Worked directly with C-suite executives to define and prioritize the IT strategy, translating business growth objectives into a technology roadmap executed on a frugal budget
• Architected the multi-building, multi-city network and disaster recovery infrastructure, defining availability and redundancy requirements based on operational risk tolerance

Education & Certifications

Master of Business Administration – Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA

Bachelor of Science in Information Systems – Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Amazon Web Services