John Evan Owen - CTO & AI Engineer Portfolio
"From a pending LLM patent and CUDA kernels to scaling teams of 20+ engineers, I build AI systems that ship — 4x model throughput gains, 15+ production apps, and platforms handling 10,000+ TPS."
10+
Years Experience
20+
Engineers Led
15+
Apps Shipped
1
Pending Patent
Skills
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Cloud Computing
DevOps
Agile Methodologies
Strategic Planning
Team Leadership
Product Development
Data Analytics
Distributed Systems
Cybersecurity
Achievements
Blackbelt in Zen Shotokai Karate
Pending Patent
Systems and Methods for Generating an Improved Mixture of Attention Model
QWERKY AI Inc. · 2025
Novel LLM architecture with CUDA implementation
Education
Georgia Institute of Technology
MS Computer Science
2025 - Present
University of South Carolina
BS Computer Science
Summa Cum Laude
Programming Languages
C++
Go
Python
SQL
Rust
Bash
Swift
Objective-C
Elixir
Java
Mojo
CUDA
Solidity
Nix
Tools, Libraries, Frameworks, Etc.
Postgres
Redis
PyTorch
TensorFlow
Scikit-learn
ROCm
Metal
Kubernetes
Docker
Helm
ElasticSearch
Celery
RabbitMQ
ZeroMQ
MQTT
Flask
FastAPI
Nginx
Terraform
Ansible
AWS
GCP
GKE
EKS
Temporal
Prometheus
Datadog
Grafana
Kafka
EVM
Socket.IO
WebSockets
JSON
REST
GraphQL
JSON-RPC
Protobuf
Eventlet/Gevent
SNS
FCM
SQS
DynamoDB
MongoDB
VectorDB
Experience
QWERKY AI Inc.
Co-Founder & Chief Technology Officer
2025 - Present
- Developed key pending patents for Large Language Models (LLM) with CUDA implementation, including Systems and Methods for Generating an Improved Mixture of Attention Model
- Built a 6-person research team and a 2-engineer product department, preparing the company to scale to additional pods of engineers
- Established a rigorous interview process that led to over 100% increase in team effectiveness
- Primary contributor of State Space Models and Mamba architectures to the max inference framework in Mojo
- Designed and architected QDistill, a process for transforming transformer layers to state space layers, increasing model throughput by 4x and enabling 1M token context length
- Current research in text-to-speech (TTS) and state space kernel optimizations
- Spearheading the company's technology roadmap and technical design processes
MerkleRoot
Chief Technology Officer
2024 - Present
- Managed a team of 20+ international developers and engineers
- Led teams through the successful development and launch of the company's flagship products
- Spearheaded the adoption of cutting-edge blockchain technologies and cryptography
- Key stakeholder in the company's strategic direction and transition away from staff augmentation
- Led organizational restructuring to align team capacity with strategic priorities after a major client transition
- Developed a solidity decompiler in Go and Rust that was a key feature in our company's product Hexman
- Optimized Solidity codebases and EVM instruction sets, reducing gas fees by 30% and reducing bytecode size by 50%
- Performed a security audit on a client's smart contract, identifying and fixing 5 critical vulnerabilities and major compiler and gas inefficiencies
VP of Architecture
2022 - 2024
- Led technical strategy and architecture across all major client projects
- Increased client allocation and revenue by 300% in 1 year
- Created the process for technical screenings and mentorship within the company
- Led hiring, conducted technical interviews, code reviews, and mentored developers
- Grew team from 9 to 20+ engineers in 1 year
- Spearheaded the adoption of asdf and Nix for development and deployment, reducing environment setup time by 25%
- Developed white papers and technical design documentation and established best practices for the company
- The primary architect for the company's main client, Forte
Forte
Architect
2022 - 2024
- Led 8 teams of 5-7 engineers to deliver a new blockchain platform for the gaming industry focusing on developer experience and a 1 million CCU scale
- Architected Platform X and the Forte Protocol with a focus on developer experience and scalability
- Reduced on-chain gas and storage costs by 75% through a byte-level metadata standard, enabling the storage of 1+ million JSON NFTs on Ethereum
- Designed a multi-tenant, multi-region, and multi-layered architecture for Platform 2.0 with the core abstractions in the Blockchain Layer and the Orchestration Layer
- Built Go services for Platform 2.0's core, including the Bridge, Orchestration, and API Layers
- Scaled Platform 2.0 Go-Ethereum and Cosmos private chains to 10,000+ transactions per second
- Built Go microservices and programming language SDKs for the platform
- Conducted interviews for senior leadership and directors of engineering
- Reduced the platform's technical debt by 50%
First Foundry
Senior Software Engineer III
2021 - 2022
- Led a 3 member research team under the Forte CTO to explore new technologies and architectures
- Architected and Built a high throughput NFT Bridge handling 1000+ transactions per second
- Built microservices in Elixir/Phoenix, Rust, Python for the Forte Platform, integrating Ethereum, Zero Knowledge Proof, and Solana blockchain technologies
- Created a robust email and notification system in Elixir with Erlang/OTP, delivering 1000+ emails per second and 10,000+ notifications per second
52 Inc.
Partner & Senior Software Engineer
2015 - 2022
- Managed a small team of 5-9 developers, project managers, and designers
- Mobile iOS app development in Swift and Objective-C
- Brought 15+ apps and platforms into production
- Rescued 5+ projects reducing technical debt and increasing performance
- Rescued and scaled a NodeJS messaging server to support from 100 request per second (rps) to 1000+ rps for major hospital systems
- Designed, migrated, and maintained a Kubernetes Cluster of Python Microservices that tracked active locations of over 1000+ devices for an emergency response company
- Created document reading and searching apps for the insurance industry in Swift and Objective-C
- Implemented a price predicting model for resorts, and crypto day trading in Tensorflow
- Built Marketplace, Healthcare, Live Streaming, and Music Platform Backends and APIs in Python, Java, and C++ leveraging technologies like Postgres, Flask, MongoDB, HLS, OpenCV, ElasticSearch, Redis, RabbitMQ, Celery, Docker, and More
- Ran supervised learning models like kNN on production platform data to recommend posts/listings/products to users
Publications
Blog Posts
Bringing Blazing Fast State Space Models to the Modular MAX Framework
February 2026
Implementing Mamba 1 architecture into Modular's MAX inference framework with custom CPU-only Selective Scan and causal convolution kernels for cross-vendor SSM support.
Mother May AI: An Opinion on Geoffrey Hinton's Mother AI
September 2025
A critical examination of Geoffrey Hinton's "mother AI" proposal, advocating for human-centered AI development that prioritizes sustainability and efficiency over speculative superintelligence concerns.
Attention: The Breakthroughs and the Bottlenecks
June 2025
Analysis of Meta's Ring Attention and DeepSeek-V3's Multi-head Latent Attention, exploring how fundamental memory and hardware constraints continue to limit LLM architectures.
Incidental Non-Determinism: When AI Surprises You (and Why)
May 2025
Exploring hidden sources of unpredictability in LLMs including floating-point arithmetic errors, parallel processing inconsistencies, and hardware variations affecting AI reproducibility.