# Brian Johnson > Building in the age of AI Location: San Francisco, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/brianjohnson I am a father to two young children, a husband, a dreamer and a doer. I bring a passion and energy to engineering and product development. Good products start with the customer. I’m currently focused on bringing hyper-humanistic digital realtime replicas to life. The future will most certainly have highly intelligent AI everywhere, and I want it to feel human: natural, ergonomic, so we don’t have to adapt to computers so much. You can envision a future where all menial tasks: grocery stores, banks, home depot, etc… are run completely automated. We will waste less time looking for help and find it immediately with the help of AI powered digital beings. My side project is bringing visibility and observability to city issues. Aerbits.ai is a small AI native company. We use AI, robots, and automation to find better ways to identify dump sites in large geographic areas so crews can clean them faster and prevent larger environmental hazard. Even if it’s very early days there seems to be a need or at least a desire to automate the persona. People want to scale persona to reach each individual in a unique and powerful way. I believe in this generative AI technology because I’ve used a digital replica to talk to when I need a good listener. I use LLMs to help me write good code. I use multimodal models to create illustrative images. It’s pervaded my entire workflow across my entire personal and professional stack. I believe we manifest our own future. When we write novels, fiction, non-fiction, we project something about our own nature onto the future. I’ve read about a future full of empathetic and massively intelligent robots, intergalactic species, utopias. I’ve also read about dystopias and evil universe eating villains. What’s clear to me is that the future will be full of AI powered robots and personas. I believe we humans will evolve much slower than AI. We will wield a power over AI: like a power button, but also a guiding light. We own the ability to lead AI to a brighter future. I believe we have the opportunity to imbue AI with our best qualities, lessons, and values. My aim is to work hard at making good AI a reality. While the balance between good and bad continues, I continue to be on the side of good: creating. ## Work Experience ### Staff Engineer / Applications / Applied AI / Research @ Tavus Jan 2024 – Present | San Francisco, California, United States Creating the human interface for the next generation of compute. Turning a vision into reality: breaking it down into pieces, identifying the most important and most challenging chasms to bridge, and intensely focusing until hard problems are solved. ### Founder/Builder @ Aerbits.ai Jan 2021 – Present | San Francisco Bay Area Aerbits combines drone technology, artificial intelligence (AI), and data analytics to combat illegal dumping. Our mission is to create cleaner and safer communities by detecting, identifying, and geolocating illegal dumpsites, enabling prompt reporting to municipalities for effective mitigation. With a strong commitment to equity, we advocate for the widespread implementation of Aerbits programs in all cities, ensuring that the fight against illegal dumping is inclusive and accessible to all. ### Engineering Manager, Premier Agent Platform @ Zillow Group Jan 2017 – Jan 2021 | San Francisco, California Servant leader to an engineering team, continuously improving technology to help real estate agents close deals. Led a team of 6-9 engineers owning the core experience and functionality of the Premier Agent platform: Zillow’s CRM tool for real estate professionals. Our team: “The Closers” worked across the entire Zillow organization to deliver fully connected experiences and premier features like: Lead Inbox, Lead Data Surface, ROI Calculator. Our Lead Data Surface gave agents insights into how their clients used Zillow and made for easy collaboration. We surfaced insights from how the clients browsed for properties, which gave their agents the insights to deliver magical experiences. Our Lead Inbox kept real estate professionals in close contact with their prospects and clients. It provided a sophisticated, Gmail-like UX, while connecting right into the heart of the Zillow platform. Our ROI calculator connected the lead funnel, from start to finish, by matching leads all the way to actual closed records from MLS systems from nearly every local board in the country. ### Senior Software Development Engineer, Premier Agent Platform @ Zillow Group Jan 2016 – Jan 2017 | San Francisco, California Helping build the most used CRM for real estate agents. We are using several of the most innovative technologies to create incredible ROI for agents who want to grow their teams and business. We integrate leads, email, phone, text, and contact information. We also package these along side into a single platform that manages listings, online advertisement, sale agreements, closing contracts, and the entire document cycle. We think big and move fast to assist premier agents with their clients. ### Engineering Lead @ Earnest Inc. Jan 2015 – Jan 2016 | San Francisco, Ca Providing fairer access to credit to millions of Americans with better tools and at cheaper rates. I led a team of engineers, building two full-stack applications in React/Relay/GraphQL. I learned a lot in six months, including React/Relay/GraphQL, how to setup and run continuous deployment, a few new code testing techniques, how to communicate more effectively, and how to manage a small team of engineers. ### Senior Full Stack Engineer, Premier Agent Platform @ Zillow Group Jan 2015 – Jan 2015 | San Francisco, California Trulia was acquired by Zillow in 2015. I continued to do the same work at Zillow. ### Senior Full Stack Engineer, Business Services @ Trulia Jan 2012 – Jan 2015 | San Francisco, CA Building and shaping products that are interesting and challenging and that have an immediate IMPACT! Working in a small team structure with weekly development cycles that allow us to iterate quickly and effectively. Looking for innovative uses of technology and applying object oriented PHP and MV* Javascript, ensuring a fast and well-coded experience for our millions of unique users. - PHP, Javascript, Python, Java, HTML, CSS, Bash, C, MySQL, MongoDB, HATEOAS - Apache, Nginx, Node, HAProxy, Redis, Memcached, Couchbase, Active/RabbitMQ - Angular, Backbone, Symfony (MV*/MVC) frameworks - Jenkins, Stash, Git integrations - Functional and Unit Testing: PHP, Javascript, Java, Python - Continuous Integration, Deployment, Testing ### Senior Web Engineer @ Billy's Billing (Denmark) Jan 2012 – Jan 2012 | San Francisco, Ca EmberJS, NodeJS, d3.js, web sockets, large data sets, analytics, and statistics. Spent six months building a custom soccer odds tracking application for a professional gambler. We used the best technologies and in the process learned how to deal with big data problems, real time updates via sockets and a ton about Javascript. ### Engineering Leader @ rateGenius, Inc. Jan 2009 – Jan 2012 | Austin, Texas Leading a small team of developers to build a large online auto refinance platform. We handle everything: lead generation, online portal, loan approval, paperwork, e-signing, title work, payment processing. We also integrated with hundreds of banks, and developed an in house SAAS solution for banks and credit unions. - Managing a team of five - Managing (5-10 servers) virtual data center in AWS EC2/S3 cloud environment - Developing key integrations to generate majority of revenue - Finding and fixing laundry list of bugs - Moving infrastructure to Amazon WS EC2-S3 - Integrating with hundreds of lenders, partners and lead sources to increase revenue - Creating new efficiencies by creating enhanced functionality and bringing more information into the platform ### Lead Web/SaaS Developer @ FinanceGenius, Inc. Jan 2009 – Jan 2012 | Austin, Texas - Refactoring and enhancing SaaS platform with new services and functionality - Integrating with 3rd party web services - Developing unit tests: PHPUnit - Setting up and maintaining AWS EC2/RDS/S3/Route53/ElastiCache - Configuring, managing, maintaining and querying MySQL Relational DBs - Training SW Developers and Dev Test Engineers - Testing code for production pushes - Advising executive board members on technology roadmap - Generating documents to obtain SAS70 Level I Certification - Implementing steps to take company to cloud infrastructure - Managing mission critical cloud environment - Managing IT and website for nationwide network of clients and customers - Moving page-load times from five seconds to under a second ### Freelance Web Developer @ magnify360 Jan 2012 – Jan 2012 | Remotely from, Austin Texas I did this as an evening part time job, along side my full time job at Rategenius. The goal was to make some additional side income. I learned a lot about the quirks and oddities of different browsers, and got some experience in the wild world of A/B testing landing pages. I am consistently a top performer, earning many special awards for completing projects on time. -Manipulating DOM with jQuery to transform client pages -Converting PSD layouts to HTML markup -Optimizing Fortune 500 sites for marketing analysis ### Freelance Web Developer @ Bojomatic Jan 2000 – Jan 2009 | Austin, Texas - Designed and deployed five fully functional custom web applications - LAMP, JSP, jQuery, Javascript/HTML/CSS I spent this time mostly doing odd projects, as a sole developer. I took on at least three major projects for pay, and developed several other projects as experiments: - ImageMagik: an online photo editing application for an eBay seller tool (https://github.com/bpanahij/ImageMagik), - Second Life Droid: a fully autonomous robot written in LSL (Linden Scripting Language), which could do path mapping, obstacle avoidance, independent target tracking, terrain mapping, filter anomalies, shoot projectile bullets at enemies, follow it's owner, and be controlled from a HUD attached to the owner avatar. - IDX4 Drupal: an IDX (Internet Data Exchange for realtors) connected Drupal plugin for displaying MLS properties on a realtors personal site in an SEO friendly way. - SliceDB: a MySQL database schema crawler that can interpolate relational DB schemas and splice relational data into smaller chunks for transporting between systems and backing up data. - TrueMarriage.net: I designed, built, deployed, and maintained for hire, a Legal Advice site for those seeking to enter into a Catholic Marriage which is backed by the letter of the law. This involved creating a CMS for managing multiple legal scholars as authors, through a permission scheme, and for creating a system for interns to enter reference materials including legals statutes and municipal laws. ### Externship in Legal Counsel @ Toyota Jan 2006 – Jan 2007 | Ann Arbor, Michigan - Preparing patent filings, engineering contracts, international issue spotting. ### Patent Clinic Associate @ Ave Maria School of Law Jan 2006 – Jan 2007 | Ann Arbor, Michigan Interviewed, drafted, and submitted patent application for solo inventor. ### Robotics Research and Development Engineer @ General Dynamics Robotic Systems Jan 2001 – Jan 2002 | Westminster, Maryland Integrated worlds most advanced millimeter wave beam forming radar into the worlds most advanced off road autonomous vehicle platform. Evaluated the feasibility of using radar technologies in realtime autonomous vehicle applications. Performed field testing of robots in military scenarios. Performed algorithmic analysis of image and radar data. ### Technical Support and Field Engineer Trainer @ Motorola Semiconductor Jan 2000 – Jan 2001 | Austin, Texas Owned and handled all technical customer support for worldwide 8-bit microcontrollers. Write technical specifications and papers about 8-bit microcontrollers. Maintained database of spec sheets and papers for library of 8-bit microcontrollers. Created software applications for microcontroller test and prototyping boards. ### Web Developer @ Jerry Johnson Management Company Jan 1997 – Jan 2000 | Austin, Texas Developing a web based property management platform for my father's property management business. My father was running a small business managing over 160 properties in the Austin Texas area. He had an idea to create a web based property management software platform that would allow work orders and invoicing to be updated remotely via a smart phone or laptop. I built that platform based on the PHPNuke (The first PHP CMS). I also added a few features for adding floor plans, tagging equipment and appliances in the floor plan, and doing some accounting in the application. As a side project (because my mom and dad worked together), I developed a backend web application using jQuery, XML and AJAX for my mom to update her listings on her website royanet.com. ## Education ### B.S.E.E. in Computer & Software Engineering The University of Texas at Austin ### J.D. in Law Ave Maria School of Law ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/brpjohnson --- Source: https://flows.cv/brianjohnson JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/brianjohnson/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-12