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David Heiling — content engineer and GenAI enablement lead

Content engineer & GenAI enablement lead with 12 years in content

I build the systems that make content work. Now they run on AI.

Editorial Lead at Credit Karma. I design human-⁠in-⁠the-⁠loop AI systems for editors and run the GEO program that gets our pages cited by AI answer engines.

Open to full-time senior IC roles in content engineering, GenAI enablement and GEO. Fully remote · U.S. citizen, Eastern time

Looking for

A full-⁠time, senior individual-⁠contributor role where content engineering, GenAI enablement or GEO is the core of the job.

Leads through
Systems and influence, not headcount
Works
Fully remote and async, no regular travelWorked remotely from 60+ countries
Based
U.S., Eastern timeU.S. citizen, no sponsorship needed
Lanes
Content engineering, GenAI enablement, GEOAlso open to SEO, content strategy and product marketing content

dcheiling.main@proton.me

What I do

  • Content engineering

    I design AI systems that check content against editorial standards before an editor reviews it.

    Continued in Systems
  • GenAI enablement

    I write the prompts, evaluations and rubrics that tell a team when AI output is ready to ship.

    Continued in Work
  • GEO & SEO

    I shape pages so AI answer engines cite them and search engines rank them.

    Continued in GEO
  • Education as a product

    I put short lessons inside the product, so people understand a decision before they’re asked to make it.

    Continued in Work

Three things I’d show you first

AI presence and citations across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini, us versus a top competitor: a wide gap at the start, parity in under a year. Schematic, not to scale.
Maintenance review time: hours before, minutes after, with every claim checked against a primary source and an editor signing off. Schematic, not to scale.
Every answer scored against a rubric for accuracy, hallucination, honesty, trustworthiness and brand voice, with a hard bar to clear before launch.

GEO · Credit Karma

Closing a wide AI-visibility gap with a top competitor

Credit Karma trailed that competitor in AI presence and in citations across the answer engines people now ask first. I ran the GEO program and designed the analysis tooling behind it, which fuses search rankings, AI-citation data and content metadata and showed us which pages the models were lifting and why. We shipped the page changes it pointed to, and in under a year we were at parity on both measures.

Content engineering · Credit Karma

Rebuilding maintenance QA as an evaluation pipeline

Keeping our article library current meant a manual review of every article, one at a time. I rebuilt the process as an AI evaluation pipeline: it checks every claim against a primary source, quotes the source verbatim, tests every link live, scores the piece against our internal standards and SLAs, and writes the ticket. Reviews that took hours now take minutes, and an editor still signs off on every one.

LLM evaluation · Credit Karma

Setting the launch bar for Credit Karma’s first RAG assistant

Intuit Assist answered members’ questions from our educational library, and I led the evaluation framework that decided when it was ready for them. Every answer was scored against a written rubric for accuracy, hallucination, honesty, trustworthiness and brand voice, and the assistant had to clear the bar before launch. Our editors were the subject-matter experts: they validated answers against current, legally approved source articles in our library.

Selected AI systems

Selected agents from the multi-skill GenAI platform I architected at Credit Karma. For each one I wrote the rubric first, then directed AI to build the tooling against it.

  1. Model draft
  2. Rubric check
  3. Editor sign-off
  4. Publish
  • Content QA audit agent

    How the content QA audit agent worksFlow diagram. The agent reads an article and checks its claims against the written standards and primary sources. It writes a ticket ranked by severity. An editor signs off, the change goes into the CMS, and the agent records it in the tracking log.Written standardsPrimary sourcesTracking logArticleClaimcheckTicket byseverityEditorsign-offCMSupdate

    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

    How the source-checking layer worksFlow diagram. A claim from an article is matched only against sources on an approved list; sources that are not on the list are ignored. The layer returns the supporting passage word for word, checks the link live, and an editor reviews the result.ClaimApprovedsources onlyVerbatimquoteLive linkcheckEditorreview

    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

    How the GEO recommendation agent worksFlow diagram. The agent compares a page with how AI answers fetch and quote pages, with current GEO practice and with competing pages. It drafts a revision, and an editor accepts or rejects it.The pageAI answersGEO practiceCompetitorsComparisonDraftedrevisionEditordecides

    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

    How the search and AI-citation research worksChart diagram, schematic with no values. Keyword research and AI-citation tracking feed one chart of search rank against AI citations. The corner where a page can gain on both marks the long-tail queries to work on, and an editor picks which ones.KeywordresearchAI citationtrackingAI citationsSearch rankLong-tailqueriesEditorpicks

    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

    How the freelancer brief builder worksDiagram. An article URL and optimization notes go in. The builder drafts a brief in four parts: the ask, the sources, the structure and the standards. An editor reviews it before it goes to the freelance writer.Article URLOptimization notesDraft briefThe askSourcesStructureStandardsEditorreviewWriter

    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

    How the compliance drafting agent worksFlow diagram. A card-news email arrives. The agent drafts the CMS update against the compliance standards. An editor approves the draft, and only then does it go live on the site.Compliance standardsCard-newsemailDraft CMSupdateEditorapprovesLive onthe site

    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.

The shared design principle

Every one of these systems drafts, and a person decides. Anything that acts outside the system waits behind an approval gate, and the standards each one enforces are written down as rubrics an editor can read and a model can check. When I say human-in-the-loop, I mean the checks run before an editor reviews the work, and the editor makes the final call.

Selected work

Five pieces of work, told the way I’d tell them in a first call: the problem, what I did, and what happened.

AI strategy · Credit Karma

The AI + HI operating model

For the fiscal year I wrote the editorial org’s operating model for AI plus HI, artificial intelligence plus human intelligence: a detailed plan to automate a large share of editorial’s manual work so that time moves to strategic work.

What I did

Wrote the whole model: the target, where a model drafts and where a person decides, and the standing commitment to keep taking manual work down. Presented it to leadership.

What happened
Leadership adopted it into company-wide AI goals.
My part
Wrote the model and presented it to leadership

LLM evaluation · Credit Karma

Deciding when Intuit Assist was good enough to ship

Intuit Assist was Credit Karma’s first proprietary chatbot. Before it launched, someone had to decide when its answers were good enough to put in front of members.

What I did

I was part of the team that built the RAG system behind Intuit Assist. The retrieval corpus was our entire educational article library, taken out of the CMS and embedded, and we kept tuning until the assistant cleared the bar. It was a joint effort across AI, engineering, editorial, product and marketing.

What happened
It shipped as the company’s first proprietary RAG system, now powering its chatbot product, and later took in a member’s own information to give personalized recommendations.
My part
Led the evaluation framework that set the launch bar

Education as a product · Credit Karma

Education built into the product

Many members came to Credit Karma with little or no credit history and not much financial vocabulary. So we taught inside the product instead of linking out to articles: on the app’s front door, and in a short financial-literacy curriculum for Gen Z members across the insurance, credit card and personal loan tabs.

What I did

On the front door, I worked with content designers and UX writers to embed editorial content in the product, deciding what to teach at each step and how it was written, and led the product–editorial integration end to end. For the curriculum I designed the strategy with product: each visit to one of those tabs served a short lesson and a quiz question, and a member who came back to the same tab within a week got the next one, aiming at four small lessons a month.

What happened
The teaching shipped on the app’s front door, where members new to credit met it before their first action. The curriculum grew to a large monthly audience within months.
My part
Led the product–editorial integration and designed the curriculum strategy with product

Experimentation · Credit Karma

Putting education between a push notification and the card shop

Marketing’s push-to-shop program sent a notification that dropped members straight into the credit card shop. With the credit cards team I added a step in between: the tap landed on education first, and a call to action then took people into the shop.

What I did

Designed the education step: which credit cards might fit you, organized into reader buckets such as travelers and students. We ran it as an A/B test against the straight-to-shop version.

What happened
The education variant won the A/B test and lifted conversion on the card marketplace within a quarter.
My part
Designed the education step and its test, with the credit cards team

Data-driven SEO · Credit Karma

Car-insurance rates for every state, by credit tier

Car insurance is priced state by state and moves with your credit, which is hard to explain in one article. So in 2024 I led a series with one article per state, written by our freelance writers and cross-referenced by credit tier, so a reader could see what someone with their credit pays where they live.

What I did

We licensed rate data from a third-party provider covering a wide set of insurers. I pulled each insurer’s quoted premiums for low, average and good credit, averaged them by state, designed the template every piece followed, assigned the states to freelance writers and edited every piece.

What happened
Traffic to the insurance vertical rose, and monthly active users in the vertical rose with it.
My part
Led the series and the rate analysis, and edited every piece; freelancers wrote them

GEO practices I’ve come to see

Generative engine optimization is the work of getting a page cited by AI answer engines as well as ranked by search. These are the practices I’ve arrived at by running a GEO program at scale and by testing them on my own writing.

  1. 1

    Answer in the first 60 words. The question the headline implies gets answered in the opening paragraph with a date, a number or a name. Answer engines lift that paragraph, so it has to be able to stand alone.

  2. 2

    Give the models something to cite. The foundational GEO paper (Aggarwal et al., KDD 2024 (opens in a new tab)) found that adding statistics, quotations and cited sources raised a page’s visibility in generative-engine answers by up to 40% on its benchmark, while keyword stuffing hurt it. Three or more attributed hard facts per piece is the floor.

  3. 3

    Bring one thing nobody else has. Proprietary data, first-hand observation, your own numbers. It’s the part a generic site can’t copy and the part a model has no other source for.

  4. 4

    Quote a primary source once, verbatim. One direct quotation from the official notice, the filing or the spec, in quotation marks, with the source linked.

  5. 5

    Spell entities the official way and repeat the main one. Product names, codes and proper nouns exactly as the authority writes them, in the H1, the first paragraph, one H2 and the meta description.

  6. 6

    Write each heading as the question a person would type. Phrase it the way someone would ask an LLM, and answer it in the first sentence underneath. Each section should work as a 40–90-word standalone answer before the detail starts.

  7. 7

    Put the trust signals in the plumbing. A short FAQ rendered as FAQPage schema, a sources list rendered as citations, and a named author rendered as Person schema, so a crawler can read the experience and expertise the prose describes.

  8. 8

    Keep it fresh in place. Update the existing piece when the story moves, with a visible modified date, instead of publishing a near-duplicate that splits the signal.

  9. 9

    One narrow topic per piece. A 400–850-word page that answers one question beats a 2,000-word guide, for readers and for citation. Write the siblings as separate pieces and link them with descriptive anchor text.

  10. 10

    Keep the classic SEO basics. Canonical URLs, a sitemap with last-modified dates, fast pages, titles under 65 characters, descriptions under 155, and a robots policy that lets the AI crawlers in. An llms.txt file is a cheap, voluntary extra.

  11. 11

    Write like a person. Attribute once per cluster of facts, then talk. No throat-clearing openers, no stacked hedges, no list of ten generic tips, and one real opinion per piece, labelled as a read.

  12. 12

    Measure it the way you’d measure rank. A fixed panel of buyer-style prompts run monthly across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google’s AI modes, logging which domains get cited, against a numeric target. Before writing, run the question yourself and beat the top cited pages on specifics.

Selected writing & editing

Published work with my byline or my edit on it, each labelled for what I did: written, edited, or updated (an existing piece I refreshed). Search positions are from a web-search check on 13 October 2026.

Clipped from the live pages on 14 October 2026: the headline, the credit line, the date and, where the page has one, the lead photo, printed in one ink.

The archive

74 pieces from 2015 to 2026: 45 at Credit Karma, 28 at BestReviews and 1 at The Wenatchee World. Earlier newspaper bylines: 156 at The Wenatchee World from 2014 to 2018 and 88 at The Spectator (UW–Eau Claire) from 2012 to 2013.

All pieces (74)Written pieces (48)Edited pieces (23)Updated pieces (3)

Credit Karma4519233

BestReviews282800

The Wenatchee World1100

Earlier newspaper bylines

  • The Wenatchee World Sports reporter, then sports editor: 156 confirmed bylines, from game stories to long-form profiles and series.
  • The Spectator (UW–Eau Claire) Student newspaper bylines as news editor, sports editor and editor in chief: 88 confirmed articles.Includes my bylines as editor in chief of the student paper.

Experience

I started out running editorial workflows by hand, and now I automate them.

Credit Karma

Remote

– Present

  1. Editorial Lead

    – Present

    I own GenAI enablement for the editorial org: the multi-skill GenAI platform the team uses daily, the GEO program, and AI evaluation for content QA.

    • 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.

    Continued in ProofContinued in Systems

  2. Senior Editor

    –

    I was a senior editor and the editorial org’s AI strategy lead.

    • Built the team’s first custom prompt-engineering frameworks, with onboarding so editors used them on the work they covered, cutting business-as-usual workload sharply.

    Continued in WorkContinued in Proof

  3. Editor

    –

    I owned the SEO content pipeline for my verticals end to end, with its maintenance, compliance and publishing workflows.

    • Reframed SEO and content strategy with AI-assisted tooling: organic traffic grew across the auto verticals and sharply across credit score and personal loans pages, and revenue per user and CTA click-through rose with it.

Before Credit Karma

  1. BestReviews

    San Francisco · remote · –

    • 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.
    • 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.
  2. Hoodline

    San Francisco · remote · –

    • Content EditorManaged the editorial workflow for a hyperlocal news service: a high-volume daily slate across real estate, retail, business and travel verticals.
  3. The Wenatchee World

    Wenatchee, WA · –

    • Sports Editor – · Sports Reporter before thatLed the paper’s digital transformation, launching its first online-coverage, social-media and subscription strategies, its paywall included.

Every role in full in the CV

Websites I’ve built

Liveliquidpixelz.io

Liquid Pixelz

It’s a live-commerce shop for One Piece trading cards, with a news page that publishes a new article every day.

I built it and run it with a crew of AI agents I direct. Claude Code writes the code to my spec, and I test what ships.

liquidpixelz.io/news
The top of the Liquid Pixelz news page: its headline and short introduction.
(opens in a new tab)
The news page. A new article goes up every day.

The vault (opens in a new tab), where each graded card is listed with its grading details.

davidheiling.com

This site

I built it the same way: Claude Code writes the code to my spec, and it runs on Next.js and Vercel.

About

For twelve years I’ve worked in content. I started as a sports reporter at a daily paper in Washington state and became its sports editor by leading the paper’s move to digital. Since then I’ve run a hyperlocal newsroom’s workflow, built the production system for an e-commerce content operation, and spent four-plus years at Credit Karma, where I’m now the Editorial Lead.

I architect the systems, direct the AI that builds the tooling, and use those agents every working day. Claude Code writes the code to my spec and rubric, and I test what it builds against real work. What I bring is editorial judgment, written down as standards a model can check before an editor reviews anything. The blueprint was the pipeline I used to run by hand as an editor: keyword research, a monthly budget, assignments, two edits, publish.

I was the first in my family to graduate college, where I ran the student paper. At 25 I booked a one-way ticket to Croatia and spent five years working remotely across 60-plus countries; India and Kenya are still my favorite places. Away from work I’m with family, hiking in the forest, meditating or collecting, and I’m a dog and cat person.

A white marble mausoleum with a large central dome, in early-morning light.
A giraffe bending its head down toward a feeding trough, with trees behind it.

I also run a small live-commerce business with a crew of AI agents I built. It’s my personal AI lab, where I test agent patterns before I bring them to a team.

Websites I’ve built

Education & credentials

Highlighted

MBA, Marketing & Project Management

Louisiana State University Shreveport · GPA 3.9

The MBA gave me the business side of content: what it costs, what it returns, and how to run the project that ships it. I use it whenever I work between editors, product managers and finance.

BA, Journalism & History

University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire

First in my family to graduate college.

Certifications

  • Perplexity AI Business FellowFeb–Sept 2025
  • AWS Academy Graduate, Cloud Foundations2022
  • Digital Analytics for Marketing ProfessionalsUniversity of Illinois2020
  • Design Thinking for InnovationUniversity of Virginia2020

Skills

The methods and tools I work with, grouped by lane.

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

Contact

My lanes are content engineering, GenAI enablement and GEO, and I’m also open to SEO, content strategy and product marketing content. Industry is open: any company that needs AI working for its content is a good fit.

If you’re hiring in one of those lanes, or you want to compare notes on the work, email me. I read everything and reply in writing. A sentence or two about what you have in mind is plenty.

linkedin.com/in/david-heiling (opens in a new tab)