David Garvan

Profile

As Director of Software Engineering, I lead multidisciplinary teams building large-scale search, discovery, and recommendation systems for a global media platform operating at significant scale (600M+ items across image, video, and audio, ~80M searches per day).

My teams design and operate high-availability, low-latency systems that power content discovery using a combination of vector search, hybrid retrieval, and machine learning. We leverage LLMs and AI agents for ranking, enrichment, and model development, continuously improving relevance, personalization, and user engagement.

I work at the intersection of distributed systems, information retrieval, and applied AI - driving architecture, execution and strategy across search infrastructure and intelligent systems. This includes scaling systems for high throughput, optimizing relevance, and integrating emerging AI capabilities into production environments.

Previously, I've worked across roles from Engineer to CTO in both startups and multinational organizations, leading teams across the full software lifecycle. I've delivered multiple high-impact, revenue-generating products from inception to scale.

I'm particularly interested in:

• Large-scale search and retrieval systems
• Applied AI and LLM-powered products
• Distributed systems and high-availability architectures
• Building high-performing engineering organizations