dave onkels
Navigating ambiguity, delivering clarity

Product leader who thrives in the gray to deliver customer delight.

Head of Product & Design at Amazon One Medical, where I build delightful healthcare products that serve millions. Previously scaled computer vision for third-party retailers at Just Walk Out, led engagement for Kindle, digital agency owner, and SaaS founder.

Experience

Amazon One Medical

2021 — Present

Head of Product & Design

Leading product strategy for virtual care delivery that both customers and providers love.

Healthcare Product Strategy Agentic AI

Amazon Just Walk Out

2018 — 2020

Principal Product Manager-Technical

Scaled the world's most advanced checkout-free shopping technology. Orchestrated computer vision and ML systems at the frontier of retail automation—hundreds of cameras, sensor fusion, real-time inference at scale.

Computer Vision ML at Scale Sensor Fusion Retail Tech

Amazon Kindle

2017 — 2018

Senior Product Manager-Technical

Led growth initiatives across Kindle devices and apps. Entry point into big tech—learned Amazon's mechanisms for operating at scale.

Growth Consumer Devices

Magnt

2008 — 2012

Co-Founder → Acquired

Built an early SaaS platform for personal brand websites with integrated social media and custom CMS. Featured by Mashable and TechCrunch. Acquired in 2012.

Founder SaaS Exit

Earlier: Dotvita, Oven Bits, RadioShack, Identity Mark

1993 — 2017

Director of store design at national retailer, CPO for a mobile commerce platform, and BD lead managing carrier partnerships—foundations for my later work in retail tech and platform products.

Philosophy

Flip the problem

I look for the constraint everyone treats as fixed, then question whether it is.

Systems over heroics

Build systems, not heroes. The best implementations are boring and just work, reliably, at scale.

Builder mindset

Don't just specify; build. I run a homelab, prototype with local AI, and automate my own workflows. My passion for tech crosses over from work to play.

Thrive in the gray

Drive clarity where others stall. Navigate uncertainty; be that technical, ethical, or regulatory. This is where I add the most value.

“I turn messy inputs into clear decisions.”

—Dave Onkels

Things I'm Building Personally

Agentic Workflows

N8N + local LLMs (Ollama) for automated triage, document processing, and context-aware routing. Privacy-first, self-hosted.

Memory Systems

PKM architecture in Obsidian with AI augmentation. Memory Guardian for context persistence, Daily Bootstrap for routine automation.

Home Automation

3,860+ entity Home Assistant deployment. Proxmox cluster, TrueNAS/ZFS, Frigate NVR, Tailscale mesh—systems thinking at home scale.

Local-First Stack

Privacy-first infrastructure: local DNS, Ollama for inference, custom MCP servers, self-hosted everything. Sovereignty over convenience.