David Berquist
Modernization Engineer
David Berquist developed a passion for technology at a young age, teaching himself programming, building his own desktop computer, and working on small robotics and electrical engineering projects while still in elementary school. In 2011 he graduated from SUNY at Buffalo with a bachelor’s in computer science and invaluable experience from his involvement in several student engineering organizations. He led multiple robotics projects, designing and building battlebots, autonomous robots, and high altitude data collection systems. When elected as president of the UB IEEE student chapter, he significantly expanded events, project offerings, and organized a wide range of free hands-on workshops, resulting in the organization more than doubling in size. Throughout his career, David has focused on automation and modernization, applying technology and modern processes to enhance team productivity and improve software quality. At Assured Information Security, he pioneered a new automation solution for testing the team’s bare-metal virtualization operating system product, allowing software engineers to devote more of their time to development. While at Anaren, he enhanced a web-based IDE which enabled users and organizations to create integrated embedded code, phone apps, and cloud software all at once without requiring programming experience, making it easy to develop smart devices. At Parsons he championed Docker and Ansible adoption on a large-scale internet simulation project, and developed a new interface to define the desired networks and devices. These two initiatives allowed the team to quickly and easily specify an internetwork configuration, then automatically deploy it rapidly and reliably to hundreds of individual computers and networking devices. He also developed and then led a networking workshop for years, training hundreds of employees in the key skills required for company projects. At Microsoft, he developed new Azure government service offerings, achieved a reduction of $46,000 per month in the team’s development Azure subscription expenses, and created an award-winning AI-powered career training tool for a local non-profit. Currently, as a Modernization Engineer at Spear AI, he's combining the latest innovative technologies with mission-critical engineering to modernize the combat systems of US nuclear submarines. Outside of work, you’ll find David building IoT devices, exploring AI art and music generation, and spending quality time with his twin daughters.