David Bowland

Director of Engineering — ProductPlan

Lead Engineer · Manager, Engineering · Director of Engineering

• –Brought in directly by the board to evaluate and strengthen the company's engineering practices
• –The first at ProductPlan to champion AI: led adoption across the product, customer service, and the engineering workflow before it was standard practice
• –Built the foundational AI infrastructure — in-app chat assistant, customer service bots, and developer tooling — that became the baseline for subsequent AI work
• –Leads teams spanning both feature development and platform work
• –Ships continuously from a Ruby on Rails and React monorepo via daily deploys
• –Elevates engineers across levels — junior to senior IC — through code review, architecture guidance, and one-on-ones

Technical Lead — TalentReef

Senior Software Engineer · Technical Lead

• –Led the highest-performing feature team — a distinction earned within six months of inheriting a formerly production support team
• –Designed a cloud-native architecture on AWS (ECS, Lambda, RDS) to replace a legacy monolith
• –Established engineering best practices and the processes to make them stick
• –Coached other team leads on leading teams and shipping
• –Automated repetitive DevOps work with CloudFormation, Terraform, and shell scripting

Software Developer — Carfax

• –Built JVM-based backend services and data pipelines
• –Built Node.js services with React frontends
• –Deployed via Jenkins to Kubernetes on AWS or on-premise
• –Promoted to acting team leader within ten months of joining

Senior Programmer Analyst — Boone County Government

Programmer Analyst · Senior Programmer Analyst

• –Built full-stack web applications with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript on ASP, ASP.NET, and Java backends
• –Wrote COBOL and IBM CL applications on IBM System i
• –Owned product management for two major projects end-to-end
• –Earned three merit-based raises outside the annual review cycle

Columbia College— Columbia, MO

Bachelor of Science — GPA 3.68

Major: Computer Science — Minor: Business

• –Graduated cum laude with a GPA of 3.68/4.0
• –Earned an A in all computer science classes

David H. Hickman High School— Columbia, MO