Daniel Roelker
Co-founder And CEO at Embedded Ventures
Los Angeles, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDaniel Roelker is a seasoned technology founder and engineering executive with 10 years of senior leadership experience and a two-decade technical career spanning startups, government R&D, and high-growth product companies. He has led software and product organizations at SpaceX, Subspace, and OpenSea (where he served as VP of Engineering), and most recently co-founded Observable Space after founding OurSky, bringing deep domain expertise in space systems, developer platforms, and blockchain-enabled marketplaces. A hands-on engineer by training, Daniel has contributed to open-source blockchain tooling—improving the OpenSea JS SDK and smart contract integrations for notable NFT examples—demonstrating both low-level Solidity fluency and SDK-level architecture skills. He also advised venture efforts at Embedded Ventures and served as Chief Technology Advisor at CSIS’s Wadhwani Center for AI, blending technical strategy with policy and investment perspectives. Based in Los Angeles, he combines product-oriented leadership with operational rigor across security, distributed systems, and developer ecosystems, and brings an uncommon mix of defense, gaming, space, and crypto experience to founder-stage ventures.
10 years of coding experience
21 years of employment as a software developer
BS, Mathematics, Philosophy, BS, Mathematics, Philosophy at Columbia Union College
Github Skills (12)
smart-contracts10
typescript10
javascript10
typescripts10
solidity10
web3js10
ethereum10
typescript-types10
blockchain10
infura9
truffle9
nodejs8
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
ProjectOpenSea/opensea-creatures
Mar 2019 - Jun 2020
Example non-fungible collectible, to demonstrate OpenSea integration
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:2 reviews, 14 commits, 13 PRs in 1 year 3 months
Contributions summary:Daniel contributed to the OpenSea Creatures project by implementing and updating smart contracts and related scripts. Their work includes adding a migrations contract, modifying Infura URLs, and adjusting gas prices in the Truffle configuration. They also updated the example scripts to leverage the new SDK argument structure and formatted the codebase using Prettier. The user's contributions demonstrate expertise in blockchain development with Solidity and integration with the OpenSea ecosystem.
opensea
ProjectOpenSea/opensea-sdk
Jan 2020 - Nov 2020
TypeScript SDK for the OpenSea marketplace
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:15 commits, 14 PRs, 6 pushes in 10 months
Contributions summary:Daniel primarily focused on enhancing the OpenSea JavaScript SDK. Their work included fixing typos and updating the smart contract wallet detection mechanisms. They refactored code related to order authorization and added functionality for English auction reserve prices, demonstrating an understanding of the underlying smart contract interactions and order processing logic. Furthermore, the user contributed to documentation and build processes.
openseatypescript
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.