As an academic, David has taught at the University of Florida, Eastern Oregon State College, Blue Mountain Community College, the University of Alaska, San Francisco State University, and San Jose State Univeristy. 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 the Barrow and the Bethel regions. David was awarded an Annenberg Fellowship to the Breadloaf School of English as a Breadloaf Teacher Network member.

David left teaching as a profession in 1997 but continues to teach while building a three-decade career in product management.

In the technology space, David has worked for the likes of AvantGo, Satmetrix, TailWind, David Koehn Inc. (his own consulting business), Saba, Oracle, D2L, Udemy, Classera & Skillsoft. David's use of technology for learning has been evident from the early days of the Internet to his current efforts at Skillsoft. 

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 close to 200 startups across many batches. IASV has its funds invested in dozens of 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 of the literary non-profit Omnidawn from 2014-2021 and remains engaged. 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), intervals of, in collaboration with Rebecca Resinski (Blue Bag Press), Twine (Bauhan), and Scatterplot (Omnidawn). David also edited Compendium (Omnidawn) about Donald Justice's thoughts on prosody. Omnidawn also published his most recent full-length book of poems, Sur, in 2024.