Dave Holmes-Kinsella

Data & Analytics Leadership | AI-Native Teams | Source-of-Truth Platforms

San Francisco Bay Area davehk@gmail.comdhk.iolinkedin.com/in/davehkgithub.com/dhk

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Data and analytics leader and hands-on builder with 25+ years turning messy data into decisions, products, and AI that holds up — across healthcare, fintech, and telecommunications. Builds the sources of truth, teams, and engineering practices that analytics organizations run on, and is now making those organizations AI-native: evaluation loops, AI-assisted development standards, and agentic systems in production. Leads as a player/coach — close enough to the work to ship the first version, and focused on building capability that outlasts any single project.

  • $100B+ledger activity reconciled to the penny between a banking platform and its partner banks
  • 14 days → 1 minmonth-end invoice preparation, via authoritative sources, ownership, and upstream monitoring
  • 267%data-platform adoption from turning internal analytics into customer-operated products
  • 5.5×AI campaign call completion from a production agentic sequencing system
Experience

Infinitus Systems Head of Data

Dec 2024 – Present

Healthcare AI company automating benefits verification and payer interactions.

  • Reduced month-end invoice preparation from 14 days to one minute by establishing authoritative data sources, explicit ownership, and upstream monitoring between product engineering and analytics — catching data issues before they spread.
  • Introduced structured pull-request review, architecture compliance, evidence-based testing, and validation into AI-assisted development; led adoption of evaluation loops across the analytics function.
  • Designed and shipped a production Markov-based agentic sequencing system that selects the next action from contact state, lifting AI campaign call completion 5.5× (0.89% → 4.95%) across 100,000+ interactions.
  • Led the company's first disparate-impact study of AI outcomes across a Medicare and managed-plan population (CDC/ATSDR 2022 Social Vulnerability Index, ZIP code), exercising judgment under regulatory and ethical ambiguity with no internal playbook.
  • Cut operational insight latency from two days to under two hours during a live customer pilot using deterministic retrieval, model-based problem identification, and root-cause analysis; shipped the first version in two days.

Synctera Head of Data Science

Mar 2021 – May 2024

Banking-as-a-service platform providing banking infrastructure to fintech companies.

  • Architected the financial data-integrity platform that reconciled $100B+ in ledger activity to the penny between Synctera's ledger and its banking partners.
  • Increased data-platform adoption 267% by launching Synctera Insights and Secure File Delivery, converting internal analytics into customer-operated products.
  • Built reconciliation evidence, exception reporting, and investigation systems that cut turnaround from weeks to three days, increasing Finance and Payment Operations productivity 6×.
  • Established analytics engineering architecture, development, testing, and code-review standards across the engineering organization.

Afresh Director, Data

Jul 2019 – Mar 2021

AI inventory-management platform for grocery retailers; among the company's first dozen employees.

  • Helped drive an 80% reduction in stock-outs and a 25% reduction in shrink through analytics products focused on adoption of AI ordering recommendations.
  • Built analytical capability across the organization by training Business Operations in SQL and coaching engineers in advanced query design.

DHK Consulting Principal

Jul 2016 – Mar 2022; May 2024 – Present

Embedded, short-cycle technical consulting across banking, fintech, datacenter infrastructure, legal technology, and healthcare revenue-cycle management.

  • Facebook (via PRO Unlimited), Data, Metrics & Process, 2018–2019: turned an open-ended data-quality mandate into a five-phase technical roadmap; embedded with engineering teams to improve SQL, warehouse design, and analytical architecture.
  • Palate App, Technical Advisor, 2018: designed a PostgreSQL forensic-auditing system for change capture and retrospective investigation, and a polymorphic-key architecture for a JSON-based NoSQL extension.

Slice Technologies Director, Data Science & Innovation

Jul 2011 – Jul 2016

Machine-learning consumer purchase analytics company; acquired by Rakuten.

  • Built the company's first retail analytics products; internal expert on performant analytical SQL and data-system architecture.
  • Contributed to a $23M financing; identified the VibrantData acquisition opportunity and led the data transition through Rakuten's acquisition of Slice.

Root 3 Solutions Co-Founder

2011 – 2016
  • Founded Tungsten, a cloud database and analytics platform for telecommunications network planning.

FiberTower Director, Analytics

Sep 2003 – Mar 2011

Wireless backhaul provider.

  • Invented a geospatial indexing approach for evaluating network opportunities, improving network-design efficiency 10×+ and cutting capital-investment decision cost 10×.
  • Built what became the telecommunications industry's most comprehensive database of cell sites, towers, and fiber routes; owned decision-support systems for multimillion-dollar infrastructure investments and FCC filings.

Gupta / Centura Software Sales Engineer

  • Helped produce the largest sales in the Australasia market; authored Using Gupta SQLWindows, Special Edition (10,000+ copies sold).
Selected AI Projects
  • wingman — Career-intelligence platform with layered architecture, an MCP server, multi-provider inference, and source-preserving retrieval.
  • work-ledger — Analyzes work done with AI and identifies repeated processes better implemented as deterministic software — AI-native operating-model design.
  • tricorder — Engineering-intelligence system that audits repository practices and recommends team-level improvements.
Skills
LeadershipBuilding and upskilling analytics teams, AI operationalization, organizational change, engineering standards, executive communication, cross-functional leadership
Data & AnalyticsSQL, Python, dbt, BigQuery, Snowflake, DuckDB, PostgreSQL, data architecture, semantic layers, data governance and quality, statistical analysis
AILLMs, agentic system design, AI evaluation and validation, deterministic retrieval, Model Context Protocol (MCP), AI-assisted development, disparate-impact analysis
Platform & ProductSource-of-truth architecture, customer-facing analytics, data product design, API and integration design, monitoring, root-cause analysis