David Ecklund

Ruby on Rails Software Engineer
Bottrop, NRW, Germany
linkedin.com/in/ecklunddavid
Ruby on Rails engineer with nearly four years of production experience across founder, startup, and consultancy settings. Recent work includes resumable, idempotent backend workflows and LLM evaluation pipelines. English native, German C2.

Work Experience

Founder & Software Engineer

In the Original

Oct 2024 - Current
  • Designed and built a production Ruby on Rails foreign-language reading platform with adaptive per-user rendering, durable vocabulary/progress state, and a multi-pass language-processing pipeline.
  • Engineered resumable workflows using transactional checkpoints, row locking, idempotency, and operator repair tooling to survive restarts and provider failures.
  • Built a deterministic LLM evaluation harness using adversarial fixtures, repeat-run variance testing, and quality/cost/latency criteria to select production models.
  • Selected for an ElevenLabs Startup Grant
  • Portfolio: intheoriginal.com/portfolio

Technical Consultant

Jan 2023 - Sep 2024
  • Developed and maintained features across a complex Ruby on Rails B2B platform supporting commerce between a major telecommunications company and German public-sector customers
  • Worked across backend, database, and frontend layers, implementing business logic and user-facing functionality in a large, established production codebase
  • Collaborated in a German-speaking agile team to clarify requirements and deliver features in a complex business domain
  • Built interactive frontend functionality with Hotwire and Stimulus.js

Backend Software Developer

Jul 2022 - Nov 2022
  • Developed Rails backend features in a modular-monolith architecture using Domain-Driven Design
  • Implemented command and publisher/subscriber patterns in core feature flows
  • Contributed to the ubiquitous language and business-concept naming in a remote international team

Earlier Experience

Translator

Oct 2017 - Oct 2020
  • New and revised English translations of German works

Co-Founder

Jan 2015 - Feb 2017
  • Cultural entrepreneurship of a microcollege in rural Wisconsin, USA

Technical Skills

Languages

Ruby, JavaScript, SQL, HTML

Frameworks and Technologies

Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, Hotwire, Stimulus.js, Git

Architecture & Practices

Domain-Driven Design, modular monoliths, transactional workflows, idempotency, LLM evaluation

Education

Core Curriculum: A+ average

Launch School

  • Multi-year full-stack software engineering curriculum emphasizing programming fundamentals, problem solving, Ruby, JavaScript, and web development
  • Mastery-based curriculum requires top marks before proceeding to next course
Aug 2020 - Mar 2022

BA and graduate studies in Eurythmy

Certifications

Languages

English
Native speaker
German
Fluent: Successfully passed the Goethe-Institut's C2 Test - Großes Deutsches Sprachdiplom
Russian
Professional working proficiency
Italian
Elementary proficiency