W. David Betts

Engineering Leader

I build platforms that change how teams ship software.

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About

Hands-on engineering leader with 15+ years experience. Currently at Twilio as Platform Software Engineering Architect, leading AI developer productivity for 1,500 engineers. I've led teams from 2 to 35, shipped platforms used by thousands, and still write code every week.

I believe platforms should make the right thing easy — and I've seen what happens when they do: grassroots adoption, engineers praising the tools unsolicited, VPs showing up to say "this changed how we build software."

Experience

Platform Software Engineering Architect

Twilio

Jan 2025 – Present
  • Single-threaded owner for AI developer tooling strategy across R&D (1,500 engineers)
  • Founded AI DevEx Guild, 300+ members; drove Claude Code adoption (860 active users, 87% adoption)
  • Presented AI tooling progress to Twilio’s Board of Directors
  • EM of CND Tiger Team — built Cloud Native platform, 75 active contributors
  • Co-authored 3-year Platform strategy, roadshow to 10+ VPs

Senior Engineering Manager

Segment / Twilio

Feb 2022 – Dec 2024
  • Led 3 teams (19 ICs, 2 managers) on developer productivity
  • Implemented Backstage for 400+ active users
  • Drove migration of 900+ services to Argo CD/Workflow deployment pipeline
  • Improved incident management sentiment +30pts

Director, Platform Engineering / Operations

Solid State Operations

Jun 2021 – Feb 2022
  • Led Azure DevOps, SRE, and Security teams
  • Operated production Kubernetes clusters for government services
  • Owned FedRAMP/StateRAMP compliance

Enterprise Technologist

HP Inc.

Feb 2019 – Jun 2021
  • Led 10 architects across 26 application teams and 43 projects
  • Managed $76M digital transformation with $383M+ delivered savings

CTO

Krazy Coupon Lady

Feb 2014 – Jan 2019
  • Built engineering and data team from scratch (2 managers, 11 ICs)
  • Established $6M Sponsored Content business
  • Built iOS/Android apps with React Native

Featured Work

Wave Planner

Full-stack planning tool for engineering teams. Next.js 16 + SQLite + Tailwind + AWS Bedrock. AI-assisted wave planning with drag-and-drop timeline, metrics dashboard, and executive presentation mode.

SoundSignal

Automated building permit extraction and AI-powered risk analysis for residential properties. Playwright scraping, multi-layer Claude extraction pipeline, FastAPI + Celery backend, Next.js dashboard.

AI ROI Framework

Built the analytical framework to justify $600K–$1M/month AWS Bedrock spend. Multi-agent cohort analysis correlating Claude Code adoption with developer experience metrics. Deliverable: CFO-level presentation.

Speaking & Media

Engineering Enablement Podcast

Jan 2025

Using developer experience surveys to drive internal platform roadmap

LeadDev

Jun 2024

Measuring developer productivity with DORA, SPACE, or DevEx

Writing

Thinking out loud about engineering leadership, AI tooling, and platform design. Coming soon.