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I’m Dr David “Jas” Powell — engineering manager, hands-on engineer, and team builder based in Larnaca, Cyprus. I have worked across enterprise companies and fast-moving startups, had two successful exits, and I’ve spent my career straddling the line between leadership and the terminal.

I have a PhD in High Performance Computing and Semiconductor Engineering.

I’ve taken on remote Management, Leadership, CTO and Head of Engineering roles with startup teams across San Francisco, Milan, Tel-Aviv and Cyprus. Four CTO roles, two Head of Engineering roles, and plenty of times as an individual contributor. The companies that I have worked with have had broad focus across FinTech, Automotive, Cybersecurity, Maritime and Virtualisation.

Summary

Engineering leader with 25 years building and rebuilding engineering organisations - usually from a standing start, usually under hard constraint. Seven companies across regulated finance, maritime autonomy, automotive, mobile security and defence; two exits (Transitive to IBM, GuardianApp to DNSFilter). Recently architected and led delivery of an agentic-AI research platform now used weekly by 20,000 people, and designed a retrieval-augmented system that runs entirely offline on vessels at sea.