David J Felix

David J Felix

It's all downhill from here

About Me

I deeply enjoy startups. I'm currently at Brain-CA Technologies (seed stage); before that, Era Software (Series A, acquired by ServiceNow and folded into Lightstep) and earlier, VNDLY (Series B, acquired by Workday). I've also founded a couple of my own — NullServe and Pepperonio (AngelHack Cincinnati 2014 winner).

I graduated from the University of Dayton College of Engineering with a B.S. in Computer Engineering. My interests sit around serverless, DevOps, and cloud-first infrastructure.

Companies

Brain-CA Technologies · 2024–present

Seed-stage AI hardware company building power-efficient inference chips and learning algorithms. I work across AI research, MLOps, hardware engineering, and team management.

Era Software → ServiceNow Cloud Observability (Lightstep) · 2022–2024

Joined Era Software (Series A) as a full-stack engineer; continued through the ServiceNow acquisition, working on observability and application log management.

VNDLY · 2020–2022

Series B. Full-stack engineer. Acquired by Workday.

Founded

NullServe · 2019–present

Company built around leveraging SaaS and serverless platforms as a hosting and scalable execution engine. Delivered custom serverless video pipelines and a web app hosting setup. Still active in a limited capacity.

Pepperonio · 2014–2015 (closed)

Co-founded. "Ice cream truck for pizza" — an app that sold hot-and-ready pizzas in real time from trucks routed to high-demand locations. AngelHack Cincinnati 2014 winner.

Projects

Serverless Compose

Onion-style middleware framework for Node on AWS Lambda. Minimal core, extensible by composition.

MG4.tv / iotv

Live-streaming utilities aimed at richer interactions around video content.

  • Atumsoft — Advisor / Mentor
  • AngelHack Cincinnati 2015, 2016 — Local Event Host / Sponsor
  • Instameals — Founding Engineer / DevOps
  • MyI, LLC — First Contract Engineer / Engineering Advisor
  • E-Gov Link, EC-Link — Contract Software Engineer / Technical Writer
  • Swarmfarm, LLC — First Employee, DevOps

AI Attribution & Disclaimer

I have not used generative AI, nor will I use any for generating written content on this site. My goal is to express my ideas in written form. I utilize tools like Grammarly and Hemingway to improve my writing, but I do not use generative fills or "rewrite this sentence/paragraph" mechanics. I follow grammar and spelling suggestions and auto-corrections for voice and tense. I use these tools because I make mistakes, not because I need them to write for me.

I use Midjourney and OpenAI's DALL-E to generate illustrations for my posts when writing alone might be too dry. My goal is to move away from using these tools exclusively, but since I'm not an artist, that may take time. I will do my best to identify all AI-generated images.