David Hudlow

Staff Engineer & Founder · Dallas–Fort Worth

I build the foundations good engineering stands on — and ship the products on top of them.

Fourteen years of good engineering — the platforms, pipelines, and test infrastructure that make whole orgs fast, and the leadership to bring teams onto them. I took PayPal Checkout from weekly releases to many times a day, helped ship FDA-approved software surgeons rely on, and founded DumpLogic.

See DumpLogic ↗ Get in touch LinkedIn ↗ Résumé (PDF)

How I work

Do something that matters. I want to build things that delight the people I work with and the people we serve — and actually make their lives better. Everything else is how.

I love making great software! Here's a few principles I've learned along the way that I strive to live by:

01

It's about people

When I focus on serving customers and coworkers with empathy, usually something useful happens.

02

Own it!

If it needs to happen for the mission, it's my job.

03

Just do the hard stuff

When we're not afraid to face the complicated, tricky parts up front, it's amazing how easy the rest becomes. And why not? We're engineers. We love challenges!

04

Trust

When teammates are looking out for each other, honest collaboration leads to way better solutions.

05

Priorities

Putting important things in order is really hard — and really worth it. You gotta start somewhere!

06

Automate everything

Why have people do tedious work that a computer can do? Leave the fun stuff to us humans.

07

Let great engineers work

Great engineers produce great results — if you let them. Leading well means clearing the path, then getting out of the way.

08

Protect the foundation

Engineering discipline isn't perfectionism — it's refusing to sacrifice the future for the next quarter, one solid layer at a time.

Selected work

A few things I'm proud of.

PayPal · Checkout · Staff Software Engineer

Made daily releases real.

  • 18+ steps → one button
  • few / mo → many / day
  • 1,000+ tests in <20 min
  • ~80 engineers onboarded
  • Built a stable Playwright functional-test suite from the ground up — 1,000+ tests running against every PR in under 20 minutes.
  • Automated every manual release step, taking Checkout from an 18-step release to a single button push.
  • Drove a company-wide campaign to raise staging stability, so functional tests were no longer blocked by flaky environments.
  • Onboarded the org with carefully crafted videos and live calls so every developer could write functional tests in code — ending reliance on manual testing to verify releases.
The result

The PayPal Checkout frontend — one of the company's most critical monorepos, merging dozens of PRs a day — now releases multiple times a day instead of a few times a month.

Omniscient Neurotechnology · Staff Software Engineer

Shipped FDA-approved software surgeons rely on.

  • FDA-approved product
  • multi-tenant SSO
  • zero client/server codegen

Architected the React/TypeScript front end of Quicktome — a web app US neurosurgeons use to plan surgeries from personalized MRI scans — over Node.js services on AWS. Invented a minimalist interface-definition system in TypeScript generics + Zod that eliminated client/server code generation, and led multi-customer SSO plus an egress-only security architecture for locked-down hospital networks.

Amazon · Software Development Engineer II

Distributed REST at national scale.

  • 24×7 on-call
  • AWS-native
  • national hiring pipeline

Designed the distributed service architecture and REST interfaces for the hiring portal serving Amazon's hourly warehouse and delivery workforce — React / Node / TypeScript on Lambda, DynamoDB, EC2, S3, and CloudFront, with production on-call ownership.

Founder

DumpLogic — software I designed, built, and launched.

Less data entry. Less scheduling. More operating.

Operations software for the dumpster-rental industry. One order entry cascades through the whole business — a capacity-aware scheduling calendar, real-mileage pricing across the full yard-to-landfill loop, swap-out and dump routing, and automated customer notifications by text and email. Purpose-built so a small crew can run tight operations without a back office.

The engineering underneath: every merge is continuously delivered to production behind a from-scratch test pyramid — 1,000+ unit tests, hundreds of integration tests, and 400+ Playwright functional tests — on Google Cloud (Cloud Run, Firestore) with fully automated branch-based deployment. A complete CD platform and full test pyramid, driven end-to-end while working full-time.

dumplogic.tech ↗

The path here

Fourteen years of it.

Get in touch

Let's build something that lasts.

I'm open to senior, staff, and engineering-leadership roles — building the platforms and leading the teams behind them. Open to select fractional-CTO work too. If you want help building something that matters, I'd love to hear about it!