Dave Thaler is a Partner Software Engineer at Microsoft, where he works on standards and open source. Dave has 25 years of Internet standards experience where he has authored over 55 RFCs, chaired several working groups in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), and served as a member of the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) for 11 years. He currently chairs the Technical Advisory Council in the LF's Confidential Computing Consortium which supports cross-platform open source projects including the Open Enclave SDK that Dave is one of the maintainers of. He has past experience as a maintainer of other open source projects in the AllSeen Alliance and the Open Connectivity Foundation.

During the early 2000's, Dave led the team in Microsoft that rewrote the core TCP/IP stack to add IPv6 support and authored a number of the IPv6 standards at the time. In 2020, he was inducted into the IPv6 Hall of Fame. Dave holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Michigan.