Welcoming Logan Davis
We are thrilled to welcome Logan Davis to the Pavilion team as our first engineering manager! Logan will lead our technical team to ship critical features that empower public entity buyers to deliver better, faster public services from a more diverse group of suppliers. He’ll also grow the team at Pavilion by hiring talented new engineers and helping our current team to achieve their own career goals.
Logan is an engineer and leader who’s passionate about both technology and teamwork. He learned to love working with teams to solve hard technical problems at Olin College of Engineering in Massachusetts. Before Pavilion, he led product development as an engineering manager at Mixmax (another Series A startup!). These days you can find him drinking boba tea at home in San Francisco or dancing at his desk in the Pavilion office. We asked Logan a few questions about himself and the experiences that led him to join Pavilion:
When I started looking for my next opportunity in tech earlier this year, I was looking for three things in a job. I wanted to:
For me, Pavilion checks all three boxes in a big way. I believe that helping governments be more efficient about procurement has tremendous potential to make a positive impact on the quality of public life in the United States. I was extremely impressed by our CTO Alicia Chen and the way that she thinks about leading a team and doing good at work. And I really enjoyed the interview process, meeting the team, and getting to be in person again at a cool office in San Francisco!
Comedy! I have a weekly improv comedy rehearsal with a team that does pop-up comedy shows here in San Francisco. In fact, I heard about Pavilion from my friend Jess Rosenfield, who I met through the Endgames Improv theater in the Mission! I love attending comedy and theater shows in San Francisco and reading, watching, and listening to funny stuff.
I’m also a huge baseball fan. I originally got into software engineering as a way to supplement my baseball statistics writing for the Seattle Mariners blog Lookout Landing. In another career, instead of working as an engineering manager, I’d be a data scientist for a Major League Baseball team!
On weekends, you might find me biking around the city, hanging out with my friends in the park, riding a ferry across the bay, or trying out a new craft brewery or coffee shop.
I’m from Hawaii, and my parents are seafloor mappers. For most of my childhood, they worked at the Hawaii Mapping Research Group at UH Mānoa, and traveled all over the world finding shipwrecks, exploring undersea volcanoes, and exploring strange new worlds. In my teens, I spent a couple of summers working with my dad on seafloor mapping expeditions halfway between Hawaii and Mexico. My mom even has a species of sea star named after her!
This is a little embarrassing, but I actually don’t know how to drive. Growing up in Hawaii with both parents at the university, my family only needed one car, and buses got me where I needed to go otherwise. I’ve lived in big cities ever since and just never felt the need to drive! During the pandemic, though, I’ve taken a lot of road trips with my friends, and I think they would’ve really appreciated me being able to take the wheel. So lately I’ve been studying up for driving tests and getting ready to finally take some classes. I guess the good news is: I’m a huge fan of public transit, which lines up well with working at Pavilion!
