Jon Willis
AI Product Engineer with expertise in agent architecture and AI UX
Based in the SF Bay Area. I enjoy snorkeling, traveling, tinkering with electronics, and over-engineering personal projects.
Skills at a Glance
Opacity reflects recency, depth, and breadth of use.
Languages
- TypeScript
- Swift
- Python
- Rust
General
- Frontend
- UX
- Startups (Masochism)
- DX, Tooling, Automation
AI & ML
- Agent Architectures
- Context Engineering/RAG
- AI UI
- Telemetry, Evals, ML Ops
Runtimes & Frameworks
- React
- Node.js
- Apple Devices
- Next.js
Resume
Objective
Experienced engineer building production applications and agent architectures. I create intelligent, intuitive products that solve real problems while prioritizing user privacy and agency.
Experience
Kinelo (fka Avy)
Software Engineer - AI
Apr 2024 - Present
- Built agent extensions and tooling on macOS/Deno/Swift, then led migration to web-first Next.js + NestJS stack
- Designing agent harness plugin architecture with structured tool use, skill systems, and evaluation pipelines
- Building full-stack AI features: React frontend, NestJS API, BullMQ queues, Redis, TypeORM/Postgres
- Implementing AI integrations with Vercel AI SDK and OpenAI APIs, including context engineering and prompt management
- Contributing to CI/CD, observability (Sentry), and developer tooling across the monorepo
- Designed and developed an open-source agentic workflow automation platform similar to Deep Research
- Architected a multi-agent system with DAG-based planning before reasoning-focused LLMs were widely available
- Implemented parallel agent execution to achieve significant performance gains over traditional serial approaches
- Built full-stack application using TypeScript with Next.js, LangChain.js, LangSmith, Prisma+Postgres, Weaviate, and Vercel
- Led comprehensive iOS app rebrand across a large codebase, improving maintainability through automated tests, documentation, and compile-time checking
- Decreased crash rate by over 10x (from 99% to ≥99.9% crash-free sessions) for an app serving hundreds of thousands of monthly active users
- Implemented TikTok-inspired video experience for product listings, enhancing user engagement and conversion rates
- Identified and remediated a critical production security vulnerability affecting user accounts
- Joined as first mobile engineer at pre-seed stage and scaled through Series B (leading to $340MM acquisition by Viacom)
- Led engineering team that designed and launched Pluto TV's app coinciding with the 4th generation Apple TV release
- Architected and implemented the original Pluto TV applications across Android, Android TV, iOS, and Apple TV platforms
- Built and mentored high-performing mobile and front-end engineering teams through rapid company growth
- Collaborated with product designers and marketing teams to deliver apps that achieved App Store and Google Play features
- Directed projects showcased at Google I/O 2015, increasing platform visibility and user adoption
Other Experience
Find Your Grind
Lead iOS Engineer
Jul 2020 - Mar 2021Rejuve, Inc.
Founding iOS Engineer
Jul 2019 - Jun 2020Toot App, Inc.
Lead iOS Engineer
Jan 2018 - Jan 2019Level11, Inc.
Consulting iOS Engineer
Jan 2017 - Jan 2018Citrrus, Inc.
Software Engineer
Jun 2012 - Sep 2013Education
- Virginia Commonwealth UniversityBachelor of Science in Computer Science2012