Jay JohnsonAI, Architecture, Strategy, Adoption
Jay Johnson

Jay Johnson

CEO Matlok.ai

Bio

I lead AI strategy and enterprise adoption and implementation. I help teams leverage hybrid clouds and on-premise infrastructure for: running proprietary and third-party models, automating pipelines that pull business intelligence out of file systems, APIs and the web, and a self-hosted knowledge platform serving hundreds of models (text, code, images, OCR, speech) with RAG chat over any data source.

Previously, I designed, architected and implemented a platform using >1 billion tokens a month to help teams find new leads and revenue faster than they could before AI.

Languages: Python, Rust, Bash

Education: Virginia Tech - Computer Science Bachelors and Math minor.

Interests

  • Self-hosted and open source AI models: OpenWebUI, Ollama, exllamav2, Llama.cpp, LoRA
  • Training and data: PyTorch, NumPy, Pandas, Polars, SciPy, scikit-learn, Hugging Face, Safetensors
  • Vector search and messaging: PGVector, Pinecone, Chroma, Redis, Kafka
  • Containers: Kubernetes, OpenShift, Podman, Docker (75 published images)
  • Clouds and on-premise: AWS, GCP, Azure, VMware, OpenStack, KVM, Hyper-V
  • Agentic coding and multimodal datasets

Work history

  1. CEO · Matlok.ai

    Oct 2023 - Present · Remote

    • Led businesses through planning, adopting and supporting AI for coding, text, images, vision, video, audio, data pipelines and strategy.
    • Used on-premise, open source, self-hosted AI models 500+ times a week, with multimodal reinforcement learning for tuning our models.
    • Shared how the state of the art works on Hugging Face: 2500+ AI collections, 19 published datasets (~1.5 TB) and 2 AI models.

  2. Head of AI · FedWriters Inc

    March 2025 - June 2026 · Remote

    • AI Strategy with Enterprise Implementation: designed, implemented and maintained hybrid cloud/on-premise AI infrastructure supporting proprietary models alongside third-party solutions, with 99.9% system availability.
    • Intelligent Data Processing Solutions: automated AI workflows to extract, identify and synthesize business intelligence from local file systems, internet-hosted APIs and web-based repositories at scale.
    • Secure Enterprise Knowledge Platform: architected, deployed and promoted a modular, self-hosted platform supporting 184+ AI models (text generation, code synthesis, image generation, OCR, audio STT/TTS), with RAG-enabled chat over Microsoft SharePoint and custom knowledge collections.

  3. Platform Lead · T-Systems North America

    Jun 2019 - Oct 2023 · Remote

    • Designed, architected and supported a Fortune 25 automotive cloud-hosted platform with over 1 million connected cars deployed in multiple countries.
    • Collaborative, trusted advisor helping teams with research, strategy, pre-sales, post-sales, implementation, delivery, PoCs, PoVs, cost optimization and support gaps.

  4. Principal Consultant · Levvel

    Oct 2015 - Jun 2019 · Remote

    • Trusted advisor helping pre-sales and delivery teams build and support on-premise and cloud solutions.
    • Helped establish the DevOps and Cloud practices with blog posts, conference presentations, open source, advocacy and evangelism.

  5. Founder/CTO · eNewsPulse

    Jan 2015 - Oct 2015 · Remote

    • Designed and built a near-real-time predictive news subscription service for investors on a custom fintech search engine, with pilot customers.
    • Focused on research, innovation, scale and predictive large text datasets.

  6. Co-founder · FlowStacks

    Feb 2014 - Jan 2015 · Remote

    • Designed and built a subscription REST API backend-as-a-service that deployed GitHub project repositories as a service, with pilot customers.
    • Focused on customer growth with videos and tutorials: integration, payments, high availability, usage, authentication and data storage.

  7. Senior Consultant · Red Hat

    Nov 2010 - Feb 2014 · Remote

    • Led teams implementing large IoT messaging and containerized solutions on GA and pre-GA products as a forward deployed engineer for product teams.
    • Awarded a patent in OpenShift for a novel artifact packaging and deployment solution.

  8. Software Engineer · Sony Online Entertainment

    Feb 2008 - Sep 2010 · San Diego

    • Worked with product, database, gaming and engineering teams on features for a large online catalog of subscription gaming titles and merchandise.
    • Designed and owned account, ecommerce, subscription, billing, chat, fulfillment, reporting and authenticated in-game player session features.

  9. Software Engineer · 4D Neuroimaging

    Jan 2006 - Feb 2008 · San Diego

    • Designed, built and supported visualization and predictive components of a digital signal processing engine analyzing multi-gigabyte images.
    • Worked with research and FDA compliance teams on storage and visualization for MEG, non-invasive electromagnetic imaging of the human brain.

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