Technology lead who still codes.
I’m David Pears, a hands-on engineering leader. I co-founded NaviSavi in 2020 and have led its technical development: four products on one library of 250k+ UGC videos, on web and in React Native. I set the architecture, lead the team, and still write the frontend code.
Open to senior front-end and mobile leadership roles.
Above: 991 real locations from the NaviSavi API, clustered live
NaviSavi
Case study · 2020 to presentModern travellers are inspired by watching video. The businesses selling those destinations still run on static photography, or on social media footage where rights clearance is tricky. The video that actually moves people is being made by travellers, and it never reaches the brands who need it.
Closing that gap is an engineering problem before it is a content one. It means making 250k+ unedited clips findable by place, mood and season rather than by filename, clearing rights so that licensing is one click instead of one email thread, and serving a single library through four products that each want something different from it: a consumer discovery app, a licensing platform for business, a B2C booking OTA, and a commercial API.
- 01Front-end architecture: Every public front end over a shared platform API, behind a BFF layer, with typed clients generated from the OpenAPI spec.
- 02Discovery and search: Clustered map browsing with deck.gl and supercluster, plus the taxonomy the consumer product is navigated by, across country, vibe, place type, experience, traveller type and season.
- 03Licensing and checkout: Stripe payments, webhook-driven fulfilment, licence delivery and download.
- 04Booking: The OTA side, where a video becomes a trip. Hotels, tours and experiences, with member pricing through the Travel Club.
- 05MOATS and the commercial API: The branded hub that turns guest and creator video into approved brand content, and the public API I oversaw the creation of, with proximity, taxonomy and natural-language search, and SDKs in TypeScript, Python and Ruby.
- 06Native apps: The React Native iOS and Android clients, from build config to store release.
- 07Leading the team: A distributed engineering team, while staying hands-on with architecture, code review and production delivery.
Business↗The world's leading travel video library.Rights-cleared licensing for hotels, airlines, OTAs and travel brands, plus a 5,000-strong creator network, MOATS and API access.navisavitravel.com
Consumer↗Real travel. Not travel reels.Video-first discovery, browsable by country, vibe, place type, season and traveller type. Every clip carries its own place page, with the vibes, nearby hotels, tours and the best time to go.navi-savi.com
Overview↗Authentic travel video for modern travel companies.The case to the industry: how traveller video is captured, structured, rights-cleared, and put to work in websites, booking journeys and apps.marketing.navisavitravel.comLive from the catalogue
NaviSavi commercial APIThese clips are not screenshots. They are pulled at build time from the NaviSavi commercial API, the one I oversaw the creation of, and streamed from the same infrastructure that serves the product.
Nothing streams until you press play, playback is capped, and the player library only loads on the first click. Bandwidth costs money. A portfolio is not a good enough reason to spend it.
What they said
Clients & colleagues“David led the team I hired to help develop the concept of SearchParties from an idea up to a working MVP/Prototype app. I could not be happier with both him and his team’s work. David is a communicative Project Manager/Developer and helped me understand the processes and decisions behind creating our product - something I greatly appreciated
“As a CEO I have come into contact with many Tech Leads & Software Developers - and David, when it comes to a deep understanding of what was required and delivering a working solution, is one of the best I have met. I appreciated how communicative, reliable, and responsive he is; and the empathy he displayed for both the product and our users and me!
“David was a huge asset to our team at Solidsport. We had a difficult deadline to meet when he started and he was able to get up to speed quickly, working with the team to create a solution that not only got us over the line but was maintainable and scalable.
Before that
Roles & projectsNaviSavi
Co-founder & CTO · Stockholm
Travel video platform: discovery and booking for travellers, licensing and an API for the industry.
Indeez
Senior React Native Engineer, consultant · Remote
A social music app, built from the ground up. Fans, artists, venues and record stores share one space, around a player whose discovery feed works like a swipe deck: keep a track or skip it, and the algorithm learns which grassroots music to serve you next.
SolidSport
Senior Mobile Developer · Stockholm
Production features for a multi-brand sports streaming app, across APIs, video streaming and shared application architecture.
LOQBOX
Senior Mobile UI Developer · Remote
Reusable UI components, API integrations and customer-facing flows for a consumer fintech app.
Tangy Market
Software Developer · Stockholm
Mobile UI, APIs and product development for a Swedish music-fintech startup.
Beatchain
Software Developer · London
One of two engineers rebuilding an existing React web platform as a mobile app for musicians.
LevelStudios
Software Developer / Product Manager · Edinburgh
Web and mobile products, working across development, requirements and product delivery.
Earlier career
Music, media & financial services
A decade across music, television and digital media, including Endemol, Guardian Media Group and artist management. Before that, adjudicating regulated advice disputes at the Financial Ombudsman Service.
The full CV
Everything above in one file, plus the detail this page leaves out: exact dates, the full stack for each role, and the media and financial services years before I moved into engineering.