David Schairer

About David Schairer

Throughout my career I\'ve played a key role in technology and product leadership and development - whether at my own startups or working on large projects, I\'ve always combined technology vision, product design, team leadership, and usually quite a lot of code. Almost everything I\'ve done has started on the whiteboard and resulted in a fully functional, live product. At Google I started the Assistant SmartHome platform e nihilo, growing a large technology team and a surrounding cast of hundreds to maintain an ever-growing ecosystem across multiple Google product areas. From SmartHome I expanded into broad technology leadership across the Assistant and Home space, including the emergence of Matter, and now I focus on the emerging LLM space and using AI to drive brand new Home experiences.Before that, my startup projects have involved machine learning, big data, complex cloud platforms, and NLP, but I grew up in the very beginnings of the commercial Internet with Concentric, where I became lead architect, VP, and finally CTO, I architected, built, and managed the teams and products that led to a successful IPO and eventual $2.5B acquisition by Nextlink to form XO. Concentric was all about the cloud before we used the word - distributed databases, high performance virtual hosting, big email and DNS platforms, multi-tenant security, adaptive classification and filtering, big data and big storage.A polymath by background, I like nothing better than being able to mix up a lot of different methods of thinking to solve very complex problems. Almost none of my projects were things I knew anything about when I started on them - which means I\'m always looking for new challenges, so long as they involve building amazing products and amazing teams. I have a long and successful history of finding very smart folks and mentoring them into great software engineers and architects, who know how to mix best practices and extreme heterodoxy into successful technology - and that\'s the most fun of all.

Experience

1. Sr Staff Software Engineer, Google Assistant Google Home

   Google

   Apr 2015 — Present · Mountain View, CA, US

   Founded the Assistant/Home/Nest SmartHome platform, which now spans first-party hardware, cloud partners, and the emergent Matter, across thousands of partners and hundreds of millions of devices, accessible from Gemini, Assistant, apps, and Home surfaces. Since then I\'ve expanded into a broad UTL role across Home and voice technologies, and more recently am leading engineering efforts to bring GenAI voice into the home.

Education

• University of Michigan

  B.A., Latin, Greek, Classical Archaeology

  1990 — 1994

Skills

• Machine Learning
• Startup Development
• Unix
• Artificial Intelligence
• Node.js
• C
• Operations Management
• Mysql
• Distributed Systems
• Start-Ups
• Agile Methodologies
• Internet Security
• Intellectual Property
• Solaris
• Php
• Spam Filtering
• Natural Language Processing
• Big Data
• Xen
• Agile
• Hosting
• Social Integration
• Lucene
• High Availability Clustering
• Game Development
• Postgresql
• New Business Development
• Scalability
• C++
• Software Engineering
• Javascript
• Ios Development
• Search Engine Technology
• Java
• Text Classification
• Engineering Management
• Linux
• Product Design
• Cassandra
• Nosql