As an academic, David has taught at the University of Florida, Eastern Oregon State College, Blue Mountain Community College, the University of Alaska, and San Francisco State University. David also taught as part of a teacher exchange with Japan. He taught in seven different schools in Japan on the northern island of Hokkaido in the Akaigawa region. David also taught in several high schools across Alaska, including high schools in Barrow and the Bethel region. David was awarded an Annenberg Fellowship to the Breadloaf School of English as a Breadloaf Teacher Network member. David left teaching in 1997 to begin a career in technology. 

In the technology space, David has worked for the likes of AvantGo, Satmetrix, TailWind, David Koehn Inc. (his own consulting business), Saba, Oracle, D2L, and Udemy. David's use of technology for learning has been evident from the early days of the Internet to his current efforts at Udemy. Along the way, David has had some luck starting new ventures and has spent a few years investing in innovations as the founder of an accelerator (batchery.com) and a small venture fund (IASV.com) based in Berkeley, CA. The Batchery has served over 120 startups across 12 batches over the last five years. IASV is deploying its first traunch and has invested in several startups. Before the Batchery, David was a founder-friendly investor through an angel group called the Sand Hill Angels.

David's commitment to the arts is longstanding. David was the first Chairman of the Board for the literary non-profit Omnidawn from 2014-2021 and remains an active board member. In high school, he attended the Pennsylvania Governor's School for the Arts and returned there later during college for two consecutive summers as an Assistant Teacher and Resident Assistant. Throughout college and graduate school, David wrote and published widely. He had the good fortune of working with Jim Daniels, Debora Greger, William Logan, and Donald Justice. In the years to follow, David would have the opportunity to study with many more poets, writers, and artists, including Dean Young, C.D. Wright, Robert Pinsky, Robert Hass, Sharon Olds, Andrew Hudgins, Arthur Sze, Donald Revell, Rusty Morrison, and many others. 

David has published several books of poetry, including Coil (a chapbook of poems), Tunic (a letterpress chapbook of translations of Catullus), Twine (Bauhan), and Scatterplot (Omniodawn). David also edited Compendium (Omnidawn) about Donald Justice's thoughts on prosody. Omnidawn has scheduled his next full-length book of poems, Sur, for release in 2024.