David Timothy Strauss (David Strauss)

David Strauss is the co-founder of Pantheon Systems and Four Kitchens. He has gained world-class Drupal, PHP, and general web architecture experience from his work with the Wikimedia Foundation, Creative Commons, The Economist, Mansueto Ventures, Lifetime TV, NBC-Universal, and the Internet Archive. David is well-known in the Drupal community as an expert in scalability and database optimization and is a member of the Drupal.org Infrastructure Team. He has attended several Drupal coding sprints and served as a chair on the session committee for Drupalcon DC 2009 and is a Permanent Member of the Drupal Association.

Pantheon Profile: 

Website builders walk a tightrope between triumph and defeat. The best days promise opportunity, but an inability to scale can squander it. The worst days feature attackers trying to overwhelm or compromise infrastructure. Pantheon Cofounder and CTO David Strauss has focused his career on these twin challenges: making content sites more scalable and secure—without complicating the developer experience.

If you’ve ever deployed an enterprise website, chances are you’ve benefited from one of the tools he's developed. After co-founding Four Kitchens, a successful web development shop, David found himself gravitating away from custom client work and toward infrastructure solutions. Large clients like NBCUniversal, The Economist, and Wikimedia had already benefited from his scalability and database optimization work.

Now he wanted to use this expertise to improve websites for everyone. When the opportunity to build an all-in-one website platform came along, he knew he needed to be a part of it. In addition to his role as Pantheon CTO, David also co-maintains the systemd layer that runs on most of the world’s Linux systems, protects Drupal’s integrity via the Security Team, co-organizes the annual All Systems Go! Conference, and contributes to AMP as a member of the Technical Steering Committee.

In the past, David served on the Drupal Advisory Board, the Drupal.org Infrastructure Team, the Fedora Server Working Group (which substantially shaped Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7), and as a maintainer for BCFG2 (a systems management tool popular in academic supercomputing). In addition to the previously named projects, David has contributed to WordPress, curl, Jenkins, Twisted Python, and numerous other free, open-source projects.