David L. Bowman
Engineering leader in Austin, Texas.
I’ve been writing software for fifteen years and leading engineering teams for most of them. I co-founded Bright Development and grew its engineering team to 72 engineers and the business to $8M in annual revenue. Before that I was CTO of Ocean Block Capital. Today I lead the team building OpenRouter's platform for AI agents.
AI has changed how my teams work. Agents write most of the code, often several at once on separate branches. Engineers write the specs, decide which model to trust with which job, review every change and own the tests. I still write code most days, mostly TypeScript with Effect.
Where I've worked
OpenRouter
Engineering Lead, Special Projects
- I lead the Ori team, which builds OpenRouter's platform for AI agents.
- We built Code, Harness, Interns, Vault, Managed Machines and Eval.
- Harness brings OpenRouter inference to Claude Code, Codex and other coding agents, and Interns are agents you can deploy.
Oasys Therapeutics
Technical Advisor
- I set the technical direction for an early-stage therapeutics company: Astro and React 19 on Cloudflare Workers, with the design system built first.
- I designed how the platform connects to its provider network, pharmacy fulfillment and Stripe payments.
The Innovation Lab
Founder & CTO
- Led engineering on more than 50 product launches, and served as part-time CTO for early-stage companies.
- Shipped features built on Claude to production, including HIPAA-compliant translation between doctors and patients.
- Executive teams brought me in to review their engineering orgs. I led the reorganizations that followed, cutting costs without slowing delivery.
Bright Development
Co-Founder & CTO
- Grew the engineering team from the first hire to 72 engineers in the US and abroad, and led it.
- Grew the business from zero to $8M in annual revenue in three years, profitable every year.
- Shipped more than 250 products, from one-week builds to multi-year platforms.
Ocean Block Capital
Chief Technology Officer
- Built the software the firm used to source properties and decide what to bid. More than 60 brokers used it, it handled more than $250M in acquisitions, and it's still in use, unchanged.
- Managed the firm's team of 12 acquisitions associates.
Consulting
Software Engineer
- Built backend services, APIs and device firmware for startups and small businesses while I served as a rabbi and studied full time.
What I work with
Languages
- TypeScript
- JavaScript
- Python
- Rust
- Haskell
- Scala
- C
- SQL
Runtimes
- Bun
- Node
- workerd
Backend & APIs
- Effect-TS
- REST
- tRPC
- GraphQL
Cloudflare
- Workers
- Workflows
- D1
- R2
- Pages
Databases & ORM
- PostgreSQL
- SQLite
- Drizzle
Frontend
- React 19
- Astro
- Next.js
- Svelte
- HTMX
- Tailwind
- Vite
Cloud & DevOps
- AWS
- GCP
- Docker
- Kubernetes
- GitHub Actions
Integrations
- Stripe
- NMI
- MDI Clinical
- Epiq Pharmacy
- Vouched
- Zoho CRM
- Resend
- Better Auth
Observability
- OpenTelemetry
- Grafana
- Prometheus
- Loki
- Sentry
Testing & quality
- Vitest
- Playwright
- Biome
AI & LLM
- Anthropic API
- Claude Code
- MCP
- OpenRouter
- Structured outputs
Outside of software
Rabbi and teacher
I’m an ordained Orthodox rabbi (Machon Shlomo and Yeshiva University). From 2011 to 2018 I taught Jewish law and philosophy at universities, synagogues and community programs, and published with Emory Law School on Jewish legal and ethical questions. My software work paid for seven years of graduate school, and I finished with no debt.
Education
- Rabbinical Ordination, Yeshiva University
- BBA, Kennesaw State University