Joshua Johns

AI & Software Engineer I at PMG

Joshua Johns

Software engineer in Dallas. I build full stack products and I am happiest deep in a data model or chasing a stuck job queue at 2am.

Dallas, TX9 roles since 2021B.S. and M.C.S., Illinois

Work

  1. 2026

    AI & Software Engineer I

    PMGJan. 2026 - PresentDallas, TX

    Ad creative automation for big brands

    Highlights
    • Shipped 80+ 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.
    • Built the delivery destination layer that publishes finished creatives to Meta, Pinterest and Reddit, adding client level destination settings, template to destination linking, 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.
    • Handled Tier 2 production support for render, delivery and asset upload failures, tracing an outage that stalled 78K jobs with Datadog to isolate a crash looping queue worker from a healthy renderer and pin it to a missing deploy time config value.
    • Migrated core modules to TypeScript with Zod runtime validation, normalized template sizing into a canonical relational schema, and added pytest coverage for a feed sync command whose missing key and bad signature bugs had been failing silently in production.
    • Designed and deployed a Slack governance bot that automates channel creation, naming enforcement and ownership across a 3,000+ channel enterprise workspace, running on AWS EC2 and Terraform under a least privilege four scope permission model.
    • Built the bot's modal driven Slack workflows with dynamic validation, automatic prefixing and input normalization, plus scheduled audits that archive stale channels and notify their owners.
    • Reviewed frontend and backend pull requests across both Creative Studio repositories and onboarded a new engineer onto the codebase, template build workflow and release process.

  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.

    Source 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.

    Private 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.
    • Ships with the marketing side too: a recovery loss calculator, per platform landing pages, long form guides, sitemap and robots routes.

    Private 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
Backend & APIs
Django, Node.js, Express.js, Flask, .NET, REST APIs, Celery, Redis, Slack API
Data & ML
PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Neo4j, Snowflake, pandas, NumPy, scikit-learn, spaCy, OpenCV, Tesseract OCR
Cloud & DevOps
AWS EC2/ECS/S3/CloudFront, Azure, Google Cloud, Terraform, Docker, Jenkins, GitHub Actions, Linux, Datadog, Playwright, OpenFeature, Flagsmith

About

I work on Creative Studio at PMG. It takes one ad template and turns it into finished ads, and a single run can fan out to 130,000 of them. I have shipped 80+ features and fixes across the React and TypeScript frontend and the Django and PostgreSQL backend. I also built the feature flags and the preview environments that got it from internal alpha to general availability.

Before that I did a five year B.S. and M.C.S. at Illinois and finished a semester early. I was a TA for a class of 800 students, I lived in the residence halls as an RA for three years, and I interned at Kenvue, Johnson and Johnson, Caterpillar and Snap-on.

Outside of work I build small things on my own, all the way from the schema to the landing page to the Stripe webhook. A few of them are below.

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  • Master of Computer Science, GPA 3.66. Jan. 2025 - Dec. 2025.
  • B.S. Computer Science, GPA 3.58. Aug. 2021 - Dec. 2025.
  • Five year B.S. and M.C.S. program, completed a semester early
  • Grainger College of Engineering, James Scholar, Dean's List

Coursework

Parallel Programming Models (CS 598 PPM), Applied Machine Learning (CS 441), Natural Language Processing (CS 447), Artificial Intelligence (CS 440), Programming Languages & Compilers (CS 421), Database Systems (CS 411), Algorithms & Models of Computation (CS 374), Data Structures & Algorithms (CS 225)

Certifications

  • SnowPro Associate: Platform Certification, Snowflake. Issued Apr. 2026, valid through Apr. 2028.

Contact

I build the whole thing, front to back. If any of this looks useful, say hi.