David Sirkis was born in Israel in 1997 and came to the drum set late by the standards of the players around him, at twelve, studying first with Shahar Haziza and afterwards with Doron Tirosh, Mark Moshayev and Gilad Ronen. He went through Thelma Yellin High School of the Arts, the Givatayim school that has fed most of the Israeli jazz musicians of his generation into the profession. While he was there he toured Germany with the Thelma Yellin jazz band on a three-concert run, and the group was invited from that tour to play the Jazz Education Network conference in San Diego in January 2015. He was also chosen as the drummer of the Thelma Yellin big band, which performed several times at the school's annual arts festival that same month, and he sat in student ensembles with the oud and guitar player Amos Hoffman, the flautist Matan Klein, Ronen Shmueli, Erez Barnoy, the percussionist Rony Ivrin and the trombonist Jonathan Voltzok. In August 2015 he played the Red Sea Jazz Festival in Eilat on its young artists' programme. The America-Israel Cultural Foundation gave him scholarships in three consecutive years, 2013 to 2016.

The decision that shaped the next several years was one he turned down. He won a full scholarship to the Berklee Summer Jazz Workshop, a five-week programme for fifteen musicians drawn from around the world, working under Terri Lyne Carrington and Rick DiMuzio, playing concerts in Boston and cutting a record with the group. While he was there he auditioned for Berklee College of Music and was offered a $20,000 scholarship. He did his Israel Defense Forces service instead, and built his early career in Tel Aviv rather than Boston.

His first substantial recording was somebody else's date. Saxophonist Asaf Harris signed to the British label Ubuntu Music for his debut Walk of the Ducks, released in 2022, and Sirkis is the drummer across the record, in a band with Guy Moskovich on piano, Omri Hadani on bass and Nitzan Bar on guitar, with Yuval Drabkin and Yehonatan Cohen added on saxophones for the title track alone. Sirkis's own name went on a sleeve the following spring. Three singles came out over the winter of 2022 and 2023, "Unleash Your Wild Self" in January, "The Specific Ocean" in February and "As the Hours Go By" with the singer Hila Rabby in March, and the ten-track album When It All Starts followed on March 31, 2023, self-released through the Rad Star imprint, with a launch concert at The Zone in Tel Aviv two days later. Talking to Stereo Stickman that month he described "Unleash Your Wild Self" as a composition that started from the melody and came out in 5/4 because that was the meter he happened to be practising, and named the Village Vanguard as the room he most wanted to play. His press from that period credits him alongside Shai Maestro, Jonathan Voltzok and Barak Mori, and he was also running two smaller bands of his own, Toa and Freeup.

The project that gave him his widest audience was KOMRADIN, the trio he formed with the oud player Onn Yosef Kadosh and Asaf Harris. Its debut Qamar al-Din, fourteen tracks released November 22, 2024 and trailed by the singles "Tiff ya duri" and "The Morning After" earlier that month, premiered at the 25th Jerusalem International Oud Festival, held November 21 to 30, 2024 under Confederation House Jerusalem. The record reworks the muwashshah, the classical Arabic sung-poetry form that grew out of medieval Al-Andalus, over the maqam modal system, and Sirkis is credited as a featured artist on the album and both singles. He is not on the group's second record. Hilalen, released January 16, 2026, is credited to Kadosh and Harris alone, as are the two singles that preceded it in December 2025, and the group's own site describes that album as an intimate duo of oud and saxophone. Sirkis was still being described as a member of the trio in the jazz press in January 2026, so the change appears to be a decision about one record rather than a departure.

He now lives and works in New York, where the bulk of his playing is sideman work in other people's bands: he has appeared with Gilad Hekselman, Tivon Pennicott, Joe Martin, George Braith and Jon Davis, and his calendar through 2025 and 2026 runs through the Alexandra Ridout Quartet, the Yuval Amihai Trio, the Rotem Sivan Trio, the Jon Davis Trio, the George Braith Quartet and the Guy Mintus Trio, at the Jazz Gallery, Smalls, Mezzrow, Ornithology and on European runs taking in Ronnie Scott's, Unterfahrt and the Sunset-Sunside. On December 11, 2024 he led his own quartet at Ornithology with Hekselman on guitar, Massimo Biolcati on bass and Julian Shore on piano, playing his own compositions and arrangements. The bassist Doug Weiss, writing for Sirkis's own site, calls him one of the most gifted musicians he has worked with, measuring him against Al Foster, Bill Stewart and Brian Blade.

Three records from 2025 and 2026 have put him on international labels in quick succession. He is the drummer of Sharon Mansur's trio on Trigger, her debut for the German label ACT, released in 2025 with David Michaeli on double bass; ACT then took the opening track, "Outside In," for its annual sampler Magic Moments 18 In The Spirit Of Jazz. He plays across Nadav Remez's Summit (HaRamaz Music, 2025), a twelve-track set with Greg Tardy on saxophone and clarinet, Ben Tiberio on bass and Guy Moskovich on piano, having toured the material with Remez beforehand. And he returned to Asaf Harris's band for I Thought I Was Ready in 2026, seven originals with Moskovich and Hadani, with Onn Yosef Kadosh guesting on oud. His own second leader project, Look Up!, was recorded live at the Jazz Gallery by Andrew High with Vinicius Gomes on guitar, Gabriel Chakarji on piano and Dan Montgomery on bass, and issued in instalments through the first half of 2026.

Sirkis describes his own bandleading as modern jazz crossed with Middle Eastern rhythmic material, and the two halves of his working life bear that out: the same drummer plays maqam-based muwashshah settings with KOMRADIN and a New York post-bop quartet at Ornithology without changing instruments or approach much in between. What critics have picked up on is control rather than display. All About Jazz's review of Trigger describes the Mansur trio as a group whose interplay heats up until Sirkis and David Michaeli gain propulsive pace, and credits the trio with translating an uncompromising and deliberately theatrical vision with precision; the same writer, reviewing Asaf Harris a year later, put the band's rapport rather than any individual's playing at the centre of what makes the record work. He composes as well as plays, and his own writing tends toward odd meters worked out at the piano before they reach the kit, as with the 5/4 of "Unleash Your Wild Self." His parents are classical and opera specialists, and by his own account that pushed him toward rock and pop first and gave him the drums as territory of his own.