David Nesting

david.nesting@gmail.com, Washington, DC
github.com/dnesting

I am an engineering leader, with an emphasis in complex systems, reliability, resiliency, security, and solving problems. My superpowers include working with empathy, communicating with non-technical leaders, and adapting. I enjoy edge cases, adversarial thinking, and being hands-on. My interests range from hacking electronics and AI to public policy.

Qualifications

• Can effectively lead both incident response task forces and product delivery teams
• Can understand, build, and troubleshoot complex systems at all layers of the stack
• Can design and build agentic AI systems and AI orchestration platforms, and understand the security and reliability implications of these systems
• Can design and build complex systems with reliability, security, and privacy in mind
• Can write efficient and readable code (Go, Python, others)

TS/SCI

Experience

March 2025 - Present

• Artificial Intelligence and Software Defined Radio projects, public safety communications incident tracking, SDR orchestration on Kubernetes, AI agent workflow and orchestration. Primarily working in Go and Python.
• Wrote multiple Ubiquiti- and HikVision NVR-related wireshark dissectors to investigate a network intrusion
• Reliable and secure network design and deployment for a 30-unit residential building
• Guest Lecturer on Resiliency and Privacy Engineering for the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator

Expert Witness, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), April-May 2025

• Consulted on IT modernization, cybersecurity, and privacy
• Testified as an Expert Witness at the US District Court for the Southern District of New York

Vega-Bray Observatory Rehabilitation, March 2025

• Rehabilitated the Observatory's telescope, which had not seen light in 15 years
• Reverse engineered the dome control system and the telescope's drive and tracking system
• Built a custom hardware control system for the telescope's stepper motors, and wrote custom drive and tracking software in C/C++ (Arduino)

Office of the Federal CIO, The White House (OMB), 2024-2025

AI and Cybersecurity Advisor to the Federal CIO (GS-15)

• Artificial Intelligence Lead at OMB, building an AI program in collaboration with IT, policy, records, and legal teams
• Built on-premise AI platform proof of concept and associated tooling, using Go and Kubernetes with NVIDIA A100 hardware.
• AI, Cybersecurity, Reliability and Resiliency, and Technology Modernization policy and implementation advisor to the Federal CIO
• Technology Advisor to the OMB Chief Information Officer on AI, SRE/operations, data, cybersecurity, and modernization
• Led a cross-functional Technology Modernization Fund discovery effort and co-authored a $~100M modernization proposal

Rebellion Defense, 2021-2023

SRE and Infrastructure Team Manager

• Ran the Site Reliability Engineering and Infrastructure team at Rebellion Defense, a startup building AI-powered defense software.
• 12 SREs and SWEs, mostly senior/staff level
• Platform was based on AWS, Kubernetes, and novel infrastructure
• This was a highly hands-on role, with ~50% of my work as an individual contributor

US Office of Personnel Management, 2019-2021

Deputy Chief Information Officer (Term SES)

• Managed a ~750-person federal CIO organization with a $100M/year budget
• Built OPM's first Digital Service team, from PD design through hiring and onboarding.
• Led a mainframe modernization activity to improve OPM's resiliency against single points of failure
• Introduced modern collaboration tools, such as Zoom and Slack, to prepare the agency for extended COVID-19 telework
• Advised the CIO on security, risk, modern practices, resiliency, and engineering
• Led a deep dive into call center issues resulting in disasterous customer experience. Built a fully-functional, call-accepting reproduction of the call center using cloud tools in about 3 hours to disprove the belief that this was a multi-year level of effort
• One time I had to build a Prometheus-based monitoring system in Go in order to effectively troubleshoot a problem for which we had no visibility
• One time I had to reverse engineer the agency's correspondence tracking system because it finally died and nobody knew how it worked, wrote an entirely new stop-gap system in Go to allow users to access their data and extract records for archival

US Digital Service, The White House (OMB), 2014-2019

Director of Engineering (GS-15) from 2017-2019:

• Mentored a community of ~50 SREs, SWEs, and Data Engineers, supervising work assignments for 25
• Represented engineering and IT to agency and White House leadership, including to Cabinet officials
• Recruiting, speaking at round tables and conferences
• Co-designed the USDS engineering hiring pipeline

Site Reliability and Security Engineer (GS-15) from 2014-2019. Projects included:

• Multiple rapid response and modernization efforts, including security and availability incidents, at HHS/CMS, GSA, State, DOJ, and other agencies
• Database incident response with the Army
• Security Engineering, performing code reviews, advice on prioritization and mitigation.
• One time I wrote a Go-based ASP parser and data flow analyzer to automatically generate code fixes for thousands of vulnerabilities in a government system
• Various projects, researching and advising on security threats and capabilities of nation-state adversaries in classified and unclassified contexts
• Built and conducted bi-monthly security training and workshops for USDS
• Built and managed multiple internal tools in Python and Go, plus dozens of small software projects as part of my agency engagements

Google

Site Reliability Engineer from 2007-2014 (7.5 years), on the logs infrastructure team, managing all layers of the logs infrastructure, including hardware, OS, and service, and supporting Google's legal and privacy teams. Projects included on-call, data integrity, privacy, access control, data availability, large-scale data migration, security, and hiring.

AT&T

Technical Architect and similar roles, from 1999-2007 (8 years), as a technical lead supporting www.att.com and similar sites. Introduced the DevOps model to the production operations team.

Texas Networking, Inc.

Engineer, from 1995-1999 (approx.), as a member of the engineering staff. This was a small/startup regional ISP.

Education

Texas A&M, Computer Engineering, 1998