Daniel Connor - Technical Leadership & Architecture
Photo of Daniel Connor

Daniel Connor

Senior Technical Leadership

Professional Experience 20yrs

Testimonials

Daniel Gelernter CEO / Dittach
Daniel Connor is one of the best, most imaginative and most thorough and efficient engineers I've ever worked with. I would recommend him without hesitation for any software engineering project; he's a superb architect, a dedicated, execution-focused developer, and a good team manager to boot. Always goes the extra mile.
Brendan Baldwin Senior Engineer / Servio / Google
I worked closely with Daniel for nearly two years. During that time I was consistently impressed with his creativity and range of skill from the visual design to code all the way down the stack. I also witnessed first-hand his ability to pick up new technologies quickly and deal with legacy and 3rd party solutions with grace. In addition to his ability, he is a true pleasure to work with, supporting his colleagues with sensitivity and adherence to meaningful principles and ethics. I highly recommend Daniel Connor for a key role in any creative and impactful project.
Will Acheson Backend Engineer / Dittach
Working with Daniel at Dittach was an uplifting and developmental experience for me. Daniel is not your common Engineer; Daniel has an innate understanding of software architecture that boarders on the artistic. Daniel strives with creativity and foresight towards designing and developing functional and innovative products. I learned a new sensible best practice, useful tool, or optimization strategy at practically every stage of working with Dan.
Lindsay Tabas Head of UI/UX / Gust
Daniel is a class-act and trusted front-end advisor, as well as collaborator of mine. We worked closely together during the time he spent with my team at Gust, and was a linchpin for our project. He is talented, sharp and multi-skilled. I relied on his expertise as a front-end developer, but also his keen design insights to help me with UX when I most needed a second opinion. If you have a chance to work with Daniel, do not hesitate. I look forward to working with him again sometime soon.

About Me

I am a senior technician emphasizing scale in systems, elegance in execution, and equity in culture. Humans have a natural desire to appreciate and preserve beauty, so intentionally crafting beautiful systems promotes growth, joy, and beneficial habits. My teams never fail to excel and I have mentored many junior engineers who have developed into senior technologists in their own right. With over 20 years of professional experience in over a dozen startups and several large corporations such as Google and IBM, I've seen just about everything.

I currently live in New York City and, in addition to technology, I enjoy cycling, martial arts, psychology, writing, and music production.

Work Experience (Selected)

  1. Autopoetic
    CEO & Founder2025 - Present

    Founded a deep-tech R&D venture focused on new, patent-pending, foundational synthesis algorithms for markets such as finance, autonomous systems, and next-generation artificial intelligence. This work is a direct resuscitation of the core algorithms created for Joules but reimagined as cross-functional foundational primitives.

  2. Google / Mandiant Attack Surface Management
    Senior Principal Engineer (Mandiant) /
    Staff Engineer (Google)    2022 - 2025

    As a technical leader for the Attack Surface Management (ASM) platform, I led a team of 5 engineers and coordinated technical strategy across four teams to support the launch of the Google Threat Intelligence (GTI) product.

    Achievements
    • Post-Acquisition Integration: Architected and delivered the core integration between Google Threat Intelligence and the Mandiant ASM platform, unifying threat data and detection capabilities across Mandiant products.
    • Platform Authentication: Spearheaded the complex integration of both Google and Mandiant authentication (AuthN) and authorization (AuthZ) systems into the ASM platform.
    • Massive Performance & Scale: Improved platform performance by several orders of magnitude by stabilizing the search database and resolving longstanding search/pagination API issues. Successfully scaled the primary database to many terabytes and trillions of rows.
    • New Capability Development: Designed and implemented a new time series API to enable the detection of critical state changes across customer attack surfaces.
    • Strategic Leadership: Designed a complete architectural proposal for the next generation of the ASM + GTI platform and served as a key member of the Google Threat Intelligence engineering leadership team.
    • Enabled continuous support of growing ASM sales and GTI contracts.

  3. IBM Cloud Databases / Watson Data Services
    Head of Cloud Databases API & Applications2016 - 2021

    As the engineering leader for the Cloud Databases API, I designed and led the development of the next-generation platform that unified IBM's database-as-a-service (DBaaS) offerings.

    Achievements
    • Architected & Led: Designed and spearheaded the creation of the core API that successfully bridged the existing Compose platform with Watson's central data storage strategy.
    • Drove Business-Critical Impact: The API I delivered now powers the majority of the Watson group's data layer needs and serves as the center of the next-generation IBM Cloud Databases product running on Kubernetes.
    • Transformed Engineering Culture: Championed a design-first engineering culture, pushed the team to 100% test coverage, and introduced a more modular, reusable, and functional application architecture.

  4. Joules
    Founder2016 - 2018

    Joules was a distributed labor workflow engine. Workflows route work from humans to machines and back again. Human and machine actors compliment each other with humans providing subjective abilities, and machines enhancing scale and efficiency. Use-cases include training machine learning algorithms and providing a scalable, outsourced labor APIs for third-parties.

    Focuses
    • distributed workers (human and machine)
    • workflows (asynchronous and synchronous)
    • payments & remittance
    • API interfaces
    • cryptocurrencies
    Technologies
    • Phoenix Framework
    • Elixir
    • websockets
    • NativeScript
    • PostgreSQL
    • Javascript
    • Ethereum
    • Solidity
    • Bitcoin
    • nginx
    • Linux

  5. The Gravel Institute
    Political Advisor & Technologist2007 - 2012

    Trusted advisor for Senator Mike Gravel across his 2008 & 2012 presidential runs, National Initiative for Democracy efforts, and other projects. Ran technical infrastructure for the Senator's various projects.

  6. CloudCrowd / Servio
    Senior Engineer2009 - 2012

    Servio was a distributed, map-reduce platform for coordinating human labor. As the first hire at Servio, I was responsible for full-stack development with an emphasis on the frontend interfaces and backend API frameworks. Accomplishments include the launch of a translation service with a 90% profit margin and an editing service that professionally edited a 1,200-page book in 24 hours.

    Focuses
    • architecture
    • frameworks
    • APIs
    Technologies
    • Ruby on Rails
    • RabbitMQ
    • MySQL
    • Javascript
    • CSS
    • Linux