# John Howard > Senior Software Engineer for Online Mapping at Aurora Location: San Francisco, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/johnhoward ML engineer looking for cool problems to solve. Jack of many trades. I love using intelligent algorithms to try to capture and emulate human expertise ## Work Experience ### Senior Software Engineer @ Aurora Jan 2022 – Present Perception and other software for Online Mapping team ### Senior Software Engineer - Research and Development @ Modsy Jan 2021 – Jan 2022 | San Francisco, California, United States As the one-man Style AI team at Modsy, I work on projects applying machine learning and intelligent algorithms to improve Modsy's internal styling tools and customer marketplace experience. This includes: - Building algorithms quantifying how stylistically cohesive interior design products are and to select optimally cohesive populations of products subject to specific constraints. - Using concepts from the recommender systems literature to improve our product search implementations - Using self-supervised and fully supervised representation learning techniques to implement visual search - Working on everything from ML research and training to ML Ops to integrating my work into our frontend services - my stack includes PyTorch, Sagemaker, S3, Lambda, ECS, MySQL, Elasticsearch, backend work in Django, and frontend work in React ### Software Engineer - Research and Development @ Modsy Jan 2018 – Jan 2021 | San Francisco Bay Area As a member of Modsy's room-building research team, I built computer vision and machine learning tools to help automate the construction of 3D models of interior spaces from captured images. This includes: - Conducting literature reviews and adapting convolutional neural networks for specialized segmentation tasks - Building a synthetic data generation pipeline to create novel rendered views of existing 3D room models and accurate ground truth data. - Designing and building a visual SLAM implementation to utilize captured pose data for better accuracy than available open source solutions. - Other work includes traditional computer vision tasks, optimization problems, backend pipeline code in Python, frontend work in JS + React, and experimental features fusing classification models with 3D spatial reasoning algorithms - Co-author on Modsy's pending patent for our room-building pipeline ### Data Science Intern @ Proteus Digital Health, Inc Jan 2017 – Jan 2017 | San Francisco Bay Area Built visualizations of company progress metrics in Tableau. - Developed dynamic ingestion counter for display in company lobby. - Built internal Tableau proof-of-concept for democratizing data pulls. - Worked extensively with Amazon Redshift, Postgresql, Python, Javascript. ### Swim Coach @ Alpine Hills Tennis & Swimming Jan 2009 – Jan 2016 | Portola Valley, CA Designed and led workouts for multiple age groups, taught swim lessons, managed junior coaches, optimized meet entries, ran team social events over numerous years. Lead Assistant Coach, Summer 2016 Senior Coach, Head of 11-12 age group, Summer 2014 Senior Coach, Co-head of 6 & under, 7-8, 9-10 age group, Summer 2013 Junior coach for Palo Alto Stanford Aquatics club swim team, Fall 2012-Summer 2013 Junior coach, 2009-2012 summers ### Software Engineering Co-op @ WiserTogether, Inc. Jan 2016 – Jan 2016 | Greater Boston Area Full-stack software engineering co-op on a scrum-based development team working to implement new functionality and to support website. Languages: Python, Javascript, Django, Node.js, PostgreSQL + Created new API endpoints to support new functionality in content management system and wrote corresponding Javascript front-end code. + Created distributed automated testing system to execute tests and send reports to development team. + Completed project moving deployment of all software systems from OpenShift to AWS, while switching build systems from Travis CI to Jenkins using Docker images. + Completed 39 total scrum stories in 6 months of varying size on front-end, back-end of site. ### Embedded Software Engineering Co-op @ CSR Jan 2015 – Jan 2015 | Greater Boston Area Worked 6 month co-op on the Embedded Software Team of the Document Imaging (printer) division. Completed project porting Android operating system (version 4.3.1) to run on CSR Quatro5500 series System-on-Chip. + Customized Android Open Source Platform to compile for specific architecture and Linux Kernel. + Debugged boot failures to provide files Android needed to boot and run on the chip + Wrote C++ and Java code for Android's Hardware Abstraction Layer to allow OS to Android to communicate with hardware on chip. + Rewrote graphics drivers in C to support double buffering, touch driver to properly work with OS + Wrote several BASH scripts and other init files to optimize performance and enable useful Android features. ### Hardware Engineering Intern @ Gumstix, Inc. Jan 2014 – Jan 2014 | Redwood City, California Mix of software and electrical engineering work to design expansion boards and build and test applications of Gumstix Computers-on-Module (COM). + Used EagleCAD and internal software tool to design and route numerous circuit boards for use with Gumstix COMs or with integrated processor. + Other projects included flash programming, 3D modeling of components, quadcopter assembly, reverse engineering of RC protocols, and some technical support for customers. ## Education ### Master of Science (MS) in Computer Engineering Northeastern University ### Bachelor of Science (BS) in Computer Engineering Northeastern University ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/john-howard --- Source: https://flows.cv/johnhoward JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/johnhoward/resume.json Last updated: 2026-03-29