David Kobia

AI-native consumer platform ("The Family Operating System®") that organizes, secures, and answers questions about families' most sensitive information.

• Architect and personally build core AI systems - designed and implemented the RAG pipeline that turns unstructured family documents into accurate, grounded answers, including retrieval, chunking, embedding, and context-design strategy.
• Built agentic workflows and state management that autonomously classify, extract, link, and file documents and drive AI-generated outcomes for customers.
• Designed an LLM output evaluation and quality-control framework - automated and human-in-the-loop evals to measure accuracy, catch regressions, and gate releases of AI features.
• Own advanced prompt engineering and context design across the product, and built internal AI tooling for assisted project management and delivery forecasting.
• Established LLMOps/MLOps practices - versioning, evaluation harnesses, observability, and safe rollout for LLM-driven features in production.
• Drive a security-first engineering posture in a product handling highly sensitive data: own SOC 2 audits, coordinate third-party penetration testing, run a bug-bounty program, and design encrypted, privacy-preserving data architecture.
• Lead the engineering organization - hiring, technical strategy, architecture, and standards - while remaining hands-on in the most critical and complex parts of the codebase.

Independent venture - five consumer parenting apps built from problems in my own home, sustaining $100K+ ARR three years running across 500,000+ downloads.

• Sole engineer, designer, and operator of a multi-app portfolio (Doggy Time, Potty Whiz, and more) with over 500,000 combined downloads - owning the entire stack solo: cross-platform mobile (iOS, Android, watchOS), backend, sync infrastructure, cloud, analytics, and support.
• Demonstrates sustained ability to take products from concept to scaled, revenue-generating release as a pure individual contributor.

Daimler's corporate innovation incubator - prototyping, validating, and building new digital ventures across the mobility space.

• Served as full-stack developer and technical lead on rapid proofs of concept, owning architecture and technology stack decisions.
• Performed technical validation of startup ventures and stood up engineering teams to take concepts forward.

Smart-home water-monitoring hardware + software platform; product now sold at Home Depot, Lowe's, Best Buy, and Amazon.

• Architected, designed, and implemented a scalable system serving tens of thousands of users and hundreds of thousands of connected devices.
• Designed and built third-party APIs serving enterprise customers, and led performance, scalability, and cost-optimization work.
• Built and led a cross-functional engineering team (backend, embedded, mobile, frontend, QA, DevOps) and drove automation across solution delivery.

Rugged, self-powered connectivity hardware + software for low-infrastructure environments.

• Kickstarter ↗

• Led planning, design, development, and deployment of firmware and cloud software powering a remotely managed mobile WiFi hotspot.
• Delivered an education-technology platform and a content management / distribution network for streaming media from edge devices.
• Built and led a globally distributed hardware and software engineering team.

Open-source crisis-mapping and crowdsourcing platform used worldwide.

• Built and led a global team delivering open-source web and mobile technologies used in 100+ countries, translated into 30+ languages, reaching 20M+ people.
• Delivered solutions for clients including the United Nations, U.S. Southern Command, and Conservation International.
• Advised and helped launch spin-off organizations including iHub (Nairobi's technology innovation hub) and Gearbox (a hardware-entrepreneur ecosystem).