David Heiling
Content engineer & GenAI enablement lead
dcheiling.main@proton.melinkedin.com/in/david-heiling
Remote, U.S. Eastern time · U.S. citizen, no sponsorship needed
Content engineer and GenAI enablement lead. I design human-in-the-loop AI systems for editorial teams, direct the AI that builds the tooling, and run GEO programs that get brands cited by AI answer engines.
Experience
Credit Karma
Editorial Lead – Present
- Own GenAI enablement for the editorial org: built a multi-skill, composable GenAI platform spanning the full editorial lifecycle (maintenance QA, fact substantiation, GEO/SEO, drafting, compliance), wired into the CMS and the team’s tracking database and in daily use by the editorial team.
- Ran the GEO program that closed a wide AI-visibility gap with a top competitor, in AI presence and citations, to parity in under a year, guided by analysis tooling I designed on search rankings, AI-citation data and content metadata.
- Rebuilt maintenance QA as an AI evaluation pipeline across the full article library: reviews that took hours now take minutes, sources are quoted verbatim, links are checked live, and an editor signs off.
- Shipped a skill that turns card-news email updates into legally compliant CMS drafts, so editors review each update instead of writing it from scratch.
Senior Editor –
- Served as the editorial org’s AI strategy lead alongside senior editing duties; built the team’s first custom prompt-engineering frameworks, cutting business-as-usual workload sharply and shifting editor time from production to strategy.
- Led the product-wide GenAI evaluation framework used to validate and ship the company’s first proprietary retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system, now powering its chatbot product.
- Grew a financial-literacy curriculum, designed and run with product, to a large monthly audience within months: short lessons with a quiz question, built into the insurance, credit card and personal loan tabs.
- Lifted card-marketplace conversion within a quarter by putting an education step between marketing’s push notifications and the card shop; it beat straight-to-shop in an A/B test.
- Presented the AI education strategy behind the AI + HI operating model to executives; leadership adopted the model into company-wide AI goals.
Editor –
- Reframed SEO and content strategy with AI-assisted tooling: grew organic traffic across auto verticals and sharply across credit score and personal loans pages, and lifted both revenue per user and CTA click-through.
- Owned the SEO content pipeline for my verticals end to end and ran the maintenance, compliance and publishing workflows: keyword research set a monthly budget, the budget set how many articles each vertical got, and I assigned them to freelancers, gave every piece a first and a second edit, and published. Written down step by step, those workflows became the blueprint for the team’s AI automation, with a model drafting and an editor deciding.
BestReviews
Production Manager, E-Commerce Content –
- Scaled content production many times over within months while lifting product conversion quarter over quarter, across a high-volume e-commerce catalog.
- Built the content-production system that let a high-volume operation scale without loosening quality; managed a large freelance network and a team of direct reports.
Assignment Editor –
- Owned the travel, kitchen, auto and home-lending verticals end to end, from editorial strategy through search performance, raising both production and SEO traffic.
Hoodline
Content Editor
- Managed the editorial workflow for a hyperlocal news service: a high-volume daily slate across real estate, retail, business and travel verticals.
- Wrote the content templates and writer guidelines the pipeline ran on, and led a team of freelance writers while holding quality and schedules.
The Wenatchee World
Sports Editor –
- Led the paper’s digital transformation, launching its first online-coverage, social-media and subscription strategies, its paywall included.
- Expanded coverage to many more of the region’s schools through data-informed coverage decisions that drove subscription growth.
Selected AI systems
- Content QA audit agent
- A rubric-driven audit agent that reviews an article the way a senior editor would, then writes the ticket. It scores each piece against our internal standards and SLAs, checks claims against primary sources, and outputs a severity-ranked ticket: what’s wrong, why, the primary-link sourcing, legal substantiation, and SEO and GEO recommendations. Once the CMS change goes live, it updates the team’s tracking database on its own. Result: Every article in the library is reviewed against the same written standards, and an editor accepts or rejects every ticket.
- Source-checking layer
- The source-checking layer that sits on top of the audit agent. It verifies claims only against a predetermined allowlist of approved sources, returns verbatim citations, and runs live link checks, so “fact-checked” means checked against something a lawyer would accept. Result: Fact-checking happens claim by claim across the whole library, and every claim traces back to an approved source.
- GEO recommendation agent
- Crawls a page and recommends generative-engine-optimization changes based on how LLMs actually fetch and lift content, current GEO practice, and what competitors are doing, then drafts first-pass revisions for an editor to accept or reject. Result: Editors start from a drafted revision instead of a list of general GEO advice.
- Search and AI-citation research
- Fuses keyword-research data with AI-citation tracking to recommend long-tail query and keyword optimizations that hold classic search relevance while improving AI-citation share against competitors. Result: Search rank and AI citation sit in one view, instead of two dashboards that disagree.
- Freelancer brief builder
- Takes an article URL plus optimization instructions and produces a first-draft, freelancer-facing brief ready for review and send: the ask, the sources, the structure, the standards. Result: Briefs editors used to write from scratch now start as a draft ready for review.
- Compliance drafting agent
- Reads card-news updates as they arrive by email and drafts the legally compliant CMS updates for review and publish. Result: Compliance updates become review work instead of writing work, and an editor approves every draft before it publishes.
Education & credentials
MBA, Marketing & Project Management
BA, Journalism & History
Certifications
- Perplexity AI Business Fellow
- AWS Academy Graduate, Cloud Foundations
- Digital Analytics for Marketing Professionals
- Design Thinking for Innovation
Skills
- AI hard skills
- Generative AI strategy · Agentic systems and multi-agent orchestration · LLM evaluation (eval design, LLM-as-judge, RAG evaluation) · Prompt engineering and framework design · API integration, tool use and function calling · Building with coding agents (Claude Code): spec and rubric first, the agent writes, I review and test · LangChain and the OpenAI API · Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity
- Editorial judgment
- Content strategy · Editorial operations · QA and compliance workflows · Fact substantiation and sourcing standards · Standards written as machine-checkable rubrics · Freelancer and workflow management · AP style · WordPress
- GEO & SEO
- Generative engine optimization · AI answer-engine citation strategy · SEO · Long-tail and keyword strategy · Structured data and schema · AI-visibility tracking platforms · Major SEO suites · Google Search Console
- Product & education
- Education as a product · Curriculum strategy · AI product marketing · Positioning and messaging · Go-to-market content · Conversion optimization · PRDs · OKR development · Cross-functional leadership
- Analytics & tools
- Google Analytics 4 · Product analytics · A/B testing and experimentation · Data analysis · Figma · Asana · Jira · HubSpot