Joshua Johns

Work

1. 2026

   AI & Software Engineer I

   PMGJan. 2026 - PresentDallas, TX

   Ad creative automation for big brands

   Highlights

   • Shipped 90+ full stack features and fixes across a React, TypeScript, Redux Toolkit and RTK Query frontend and a Django and PostgreSQL backend for Creative Studio, an ad creative automation platform that replaced the legacy Dynamic+ toolchain for 25+ enterprise brands and cut new ad time to launch from 6 to 8 weeks down to 3 days.
   • Built the feature flag gating and on demand ephemeral preview environments that carried the product from internal alpha to general availability, backing the migration that moved 100% of the company's social catalog clients off legacy tooling before it was sunset.
   • Built the delivery destination layer that publishes finished creatives to Meta, Pinterest and Reddit, covering client level destination settings, a Manage Destinations UI that links templates to destinations, per destination variant and size selection, feed compatibility filtering on the link pickers, and automated product catalog syncing that replaced a manual spreadsheet and email handoff.
   • Engineered real time progress tracking, job notifications and a reusable unsaved changes safeguard adopted across the app for render and delivery jobs that fan out to 130K+ ad variants per run, and paginated a template list that previously rendered every record on load.
   • Cut load cost and lifted throughput across the platform by adding a template scoped render info endpoint and moving single template callers onto it, removing a creative count query no caller consumed, raising web concurrency, correcting an autoscaling trigger that was never firing, and releasing a user row lock that had been held for the full length of every request.
   • Traced and fixed silent data loss in the product feed pipeline, where uploaded files bypassed CSV sanitization and any row containing a newline dropped every column after it on read, then added the pytest coverage the command had been missing.
   • Migrated core modules to TypeScript with Zod runtime validation, moved the variant table and delivery sections onto React Hook Form, and normalized template sizing into a canonical relational schema.
   • Diagnosed a stacked staging failure that had kept the render dependent end to end suite red for days, using Datadog to separate an already fixed render 500 from the real cause, a screenshot renderer whose container had run out of disk so Chromium could no longer launch, leaving renders hanging and the delivery dead letter queue sitting at roughly 78,000 messages. Wrote it up with fix steps, and the gap it exposed led the team to add the staging monitors that would have caught it.
   • Handled Tier 2 production support for render, delivery and asset upload failures, reviewed frontend and backend pull requests across both Creative Studio repositories, contributed fixes upstream into the shared Alli design system, and onboarded a new engineer onto the codebase, template build workflow and release process.
   • Designed and built Channel Captain with two other engineers, a Python Slack bot that governs channel creation, naming enforcement and ownership across the company's enterprise Slack workspace, with modal and slash command workflows that validate the name, apply the correct prefix and normalize input before a channel is ever created, plus scheduled audits that flag stale channels and notify their owners.
   • Took Channel Captain through enterprise security review by cutting its requested Slack admin permissions from ten declared scopes down to the four it actually exercises, documenting the purpose of each for IT, and drove the approval and install into the production workspace. Backend runs on AWS EC2 provisioned with Terraform, with credentials in Secrets Manager.

2. 2025

   Machine Learning Research Assistant

   ClassTranscribeMay 2025 - Aug. 2025Urbana, IL

   OCR and video pipelines so lectures are searchable

   Highlights

   • Built an end to end ML pipeline with OpenCV and Tesseract OCR to extract on screen text from lecture video, improving accessibility and search for 60,000+ students.
   • Designed a classifier for dual stream lecture recordings on ClassTranscribe, the University of Illinois lecture captioning platform, so slide content and speaker video are processed separately.
   • Engineered the video processing and summarization systems the pipeline runs on.

3. 2025

   Graduate Teaching Assistant, Computer Science

   University of Illinois Urbana-ChampaignJan. 2025 - May 2025Champaign, IL

   Course staff for a class of 800

   Highlights

   • Led discussion sections, office hours and student support for a course of 800+ students.
   • Taught Python programming concepts to 50+ students in a weekly lab while managing 2 course assistants.

4. 2024

   Cloud Engineer Intern

   KenvueMay 2024 - Aug. 2024Skillman, NJ

   Onboarding tools for Azure and AWS

   Highlights

   • Built NLP onboarding tools for Azure and AWS that cut cloud knowledge retrieval time 30% for 1,000+ employees.
   • Standardized AWS onboarding behind natural language interfaces so engineers could ask for what they needed instead of hunting through docs.
   • Assembled a React platform covering AWS, Azure and on premise estates, raising engagement with the internal tooling 25%.

5. 2023

   Data Scientist Intern

   Johnson & JohnsonMay 2023 - Aug. 2023Skillman, NJ

   A chatbot and the pipelines behind it

   Highlights

   • Deployed a production Python and NLP chatbot that answered questions about the company's products.
   • Built scalable Python pipelines that aggregated and normalized labeling data across 2,000+ products.
   • Used NLP to group semantically similar phrases from product labels across multiple languages, so the marketing team could see which phrasing actually sold.

6. 2022

   Resident Advisor

   University of Illinois Urbana-ChampaignAug. 2022 - Dec. 2025Champaign, IL

   On call for 500+ residents in the halls

   Highlights

   • Held a crisis response duty rotation covering the safety and wellbeing of more than 500 residents.
   • Worked with 20 resident advisors and 2 multicultural advocates to plan and run community programming across the hall.

7. 2022

   Data Analyst Intern

   CaterpillarMay 2022 - Aug. 2022Akron, OH

   Automation and dashboards for the data team

   Highlights

   • Freed over 20% of employee time by replacing manual data collection with Power Automate scripts.
   • Built SSRS dashboards on SQL that tracked and monitored Caterpillar's enterprise databases.
   • Designed Power BI dashboards with trendlines that fed strategic planning.

8. 2022

   Lead Full Stack Developer

   Reflections | ProjectionsMar. 2022 - Dec. 2022Urbana, IL

   Registration site for the Midwest's largest student run tech conference

   Highlights

   • Led MERN stack development of the registration and scheduling site for the largest student run technology conference in the Midwest.
   • Drew 10K+ unique visitors and converted them into 2,000+ event registrations.
   • Collected attendee resumes and distributed them to conference sponsors including Qualcomm, Visa and Intuit.

9. 2021

   Software Engineer Intern

   Snap-onMay 2021 - Aug. 2021Richfield, OH

   Moved an internal site onto modern browsers

   Highlights

   • Migrated an internal website used by over 10% of the workforce so it ran correctly on modern browsers.
   • Set up Jenkins for that website so development teams could test new features before release.

Projects

1. 01

   pinmix

   Shuffle any Pinterest board into a new board in one click

   2026TypeScriptChrome ExtensionMV3

   • A browser extension that reads the board you are looking at, creates the new board first so a taken name fails immediately, then loads, shuffles and saves every pin into place. The original board is never touched.
   • Runs inside pinterest.com on the session you are already signed in with, so there is no login of its own, no browser automation, no server and no analytics.
   • Sections come along too. Keep them and each one is recreated and shuffled on its own, or turn that off and every pin mixes together. An optional seed reproduces the same order later.
   • Zero runtime dependencies. Built with tsc, tested with the Node test runner, and released as a signed zip by a GitHub Actions workflow on every version tag.

   Chrome Web StoreSource on GitHub

2. 02

   Finish Radar

   Weekly ranked construction leads for commercial cleaning companies

   2026Next.jsTypeScriptPostgreSQLDrizzleZodPlaywright

   • Every Monday a commercial cleaning company gets the Dallas Fort Worth construction projects worth calling this week, why each one fits, who to contact and when to reach out.
   • Ingests public construction and permit sources on a schedule, deduplicates records against stable source identities so a rerun never doubles the dataset, and scores every project through versioned exclusion and fit rules.
   • Strict TypeScript end to end with Zod validation at every external boundary, Drizzle migrations, Vitest unit coverage on the scoring rules, and Playwright end to end specs.
   • Sending, scheduled production jobs and live payments are disabled by default, so the pipeline can be rehearsed against real data without touching a real customer.

   finishradar.comPrivate repository

3. 03

   Creator Dunning

   Failed payment recovery for creators on Stripe

   2026Next.jsSupabaseStripe ConnectResend

   • Creators connect their Stripe account once and the app watches for failed subscription charges, then runs a dunning sequence that wins the payment back before the subscription dies.
   • Full Stripe Connect OAuth handshake with a signed webhook endpoint for Connect events, a scheduled dunning route, and transactional email through Resend.
   • Supabase Postgres with row level security, SQL migrations for the schema, generated database types, and separate browser, server and admin clients so the service role key never reaches the client.
   • The marketing side ships with it too. A recovery loss calculator, landing pages for each platform, long form guides, plus the sitemap and robots routes.

   creatordunning.comPrivate repository

4. 04

   Parallel Terrain Pathfinding

   Parallel Floyd-Warshall over real elevation data

   2025C++GeoTIFFParallel Programming

   • A parallelized Floyd-Warshall implementation that finds optimal routes across 3D terrain, weighting each step by both horizontal distance and elevation change rather than distance alone.
   • Reads real topographical maps as GeoTIFF elevation rasters and turns them into a weighted graph, then solves all pairs shortest paths across it.
   • Ships a visualization pass that renders the terrain and the computed route, tested against a San Francisco elevation map.

   Source on GitHub

Skills

Languages

Python, TypeScript, JavaScript, Java, C/C++, C#, SQL, HTML/CSS

Frontend

React, Redux Toolkit, RTK Query, React Router, React Hook Form, Zod, Material UI, Tailwind CSS, Angular, Next.js

Backend & APIs

Django, Node.js, Express.js, Flask, .NET, REST APIs, Celery, Redis, Slack API, Stripe

Data & ML

PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Neo4j, Snowflake, pandas, NumPy, scikit-learn, spaCy, OpenCV, Tesseract OCR, Amazon Athena, Drizzle, Supabase

Cloud & DevOps

AWS EC2/ECS/S3/CloudFront, Azure, Google Cloud, Terraform, Docker, Jenkins, GitHub Actions, Linux, Datadog, Playwright, OpenFeature, Flagsmith, Vitest

About

Contact

• Emailjoshua.joseph.johns@gmail.com
• GitHubgithub.com/thejoshuajohns
• LinkedInlinkedin.com/in/joshua-j-johns