David Hindawi was born in Baghdad on December 8, 1944. His family moved to Israel in 1951. After military service in operations research he moved to the United States in 1970 and earned a PhD at UC Berkeley.
In 1997 he founded BigFix, an IT systems management company. IBM bought it in 2010 for $400 million.
In 2007 he co-founded Tanium with his son Orion. In September 2015 the company raised $120 million. Tanium's peer-to-peer approach differs from the central data center model used by older tools.
He was CEO until February 2016, when Orion took over. David stayed as executive chairman. He became chairman emeritus in 2023.