John E. Jones IV #

Contact #

  • Email: john@johnjonesfour.com
  • Phone: (570) 640-8746
  • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnjones4/

About #

Architect and senior engineer with deep specialization in identity and authentication, real-time and event-driven systems, AI/LLM integration in production, and iOS platform engineering. 12 issued patents and a track record of cross-organizational technical influence, including product changes shipped by AWS. Currently hands-on building in senior staff engineering roles for fintechs; prior tenure managing teams at a Fortune 100 spanning a regulated card line of business and an R&D lab. Equally fluent shipping greenfield architecture and shipping on production systems.

Professional Experience #

Engineering Constultant, Beat Lynch (2026 - Present) #

Early stage startup focused on financial education to medium net-worth individuals along with AI analysis and coaching for growth-focused investments

  • Reviewed existing alpha-release codebase and made recommendations for production code hardening including cyber, resilience, and operational concerns
  • Developed next generation architecture on AWS to scale with projected user onboarding
  • Assessed feasibility of expanding and refining and investment coach feature based on a prototype
  • Developed multi-month staff and resource cost estimates and made team structure recommendations

Senior Staff Engineer / Vice President of Engineering, Bondway.ai (2024 – 2026) #

Venture-backed US corporate bond market AI pricing and analytics startup. 80-90% hands-on as architect and lead engineer with heavy influence on product and technical roadmap.

  • Architected end-to-end real-time alerting platform that evaluates customer-defined rulesets against live bond and index prices, delivering notifications within 10 seconds of price calculation. Evaluated Kafka, Kinesis, and other enterprise streaming options; right-sized to a Go service running on AWS ECS with Valkey for in-memory state.
  • Led migration to multi-region active-active availability in support of SOC2 certification. Designed write-forwarding architecture on AWS Aurora, established team-wide patterns to preserve correctness under replication lag, produced failover procedures and evidence acceptable to auditors. SOC2 achieved; cleared a customer-driven prerequisite for enterprise sales.
  • Replaced error-prone weekly release process (where ~25-50% of manual deployments encountered process-related failures) with fully automated CI/CD on GitLab; drove cultural shift toward rigorous testing and routine, low-overhead deployment. Cadence now ~3 production deployments per week with zero release-related downtime.
  • Stabilized the live bond pricing pipeline serving AI-calculated prices for 32,000+ US corporate bonds: introduced active-passive resiliency, end-to-end testing, and full instrumentation.
  • Designed and shipped additional platform capabilities: ACL-based collaborative sharing, permissioned platform messaging with annotated visualizations, customer-configurable compliance reporting, customizable daily email reporting, customer API.
  • Selected the LLM for in-product market analysis through a two-stage cloud-vs-local evaluation: tool-routing in stage one, end-to-end analysis on real feature output in stage two. Local models reached parity on routing but trailed materially on analysis; shipped on Anthropic and OpenAI solutions.
  • Productionized data pipeline for SEC EDGAR prospectus parsing using OpenAI for batch document extraction.
  • Engaged customers directly through sales calls, user interviews, demos, and tier 2/3 support; mentored junior engineers, including coaching one through end-to-end development of an Excel plugin from PoC through Microsoft review.

Senior Software Engineering Manager, Capital One (2023 – 2024) #

Card line of business of a Fortune 100 credit card issuer, auto lender, and bank serving 100+ million customers.

  • Co-designed and led architecture of v2 of AirKey, the 2nd-factor identity protocol now deployed on 10M+ debit cards across Capital One and partner cards; named co-inventor on multiple related patents.
  • Drove vendor product changes in support of the identity protocol: contributed requirements incorporated into AWS's payment HSM service; identified a Chromium WebNFC defect subsequently fixed upstream and shipped in public Chrome.
  • Stood up GitHub Copilot rollout at Capital One to several thousand engineers while concurrently leading the identity protocol. Designed the rollout methodology, partnered with GitHub on integration design, represented engineering through multiple risk and cyber reviews, then transitioned ownership to a dedicated program lead.
  • Built a tap-testing robot to characterize NFC signal-strength variance across thousands of device-and-location permutations; data informed protocol and UX design decisions.
  • Established the generative-AI engineering experience team to develop, pilot, and launch internal AI tooling for engineers.
  • Managed 12+ associates and contractors; conducted engineering candidate interviews and recruiting calls.

Senior Software Engineering Manager, Capital One Lab (2020 – 2023) #

Research & Development center of the same Fortune 100 institution. Promoted from Manager to Senior Manager in 2021.

  • Led iOS App Clips integration into Capital One's primary iOS application platform: achieved 90% bundle-size reduction by eliminating legacy dependencies, tuning Swift compiler settings, and stripping unused code through build configuration. Now in production for an identity verification feature.
  • Architect and team lead for a Pyhon and Typescript based platform for managing Lab workflow, research, and intake
  • Architect and team lead for a crypto trading and ledgering platform; advanced the system to late-stage prototype with production deployment imminent before strategic redirection.
  • Owned and championed multiple internal Go modules at Capital One. Coordinated feedback, approved PRs, drove cross-team adoption; advised teams on new Go services and on migrating existing production systems to Go. Broader advocacy for Go and innersourcing contributed to growing internal Go adoption across the engineering organization.
  • Held production accountability for several internal platforms supporting Lab experiments and partner-team workflows; owned operational reliability, on-call rotation, and vendor coordination.
  • Led proofs of concept across AR/VR, identity technology, cryptocurrency, and machine learning. This research produced several patent filings and informed product decisions in partner teams.
  • Managed multiple 4-6 person teams running concurrent short- and medium-term research concepts; conducted engineering candidate interviews and recruiting.

Vice President of Technology, the Case Foundation (2017 – 2020) #

Family foundation of AOL co-founder Steve Case, focused on growing entrepreneurship and democratization of technology.

  • Co-designed methodology and led participant recruiting for a joint research report with GitHub on the state of open source in the nonprofit ecosystem covering international development, open data, and healthcare-management OSS efforts.
  • Led implementation of a public-facing D3 data visualization platform showcasing thousands of partner connections, delivered with vendor and internal teams.
  • Led development and production support across foundation campaign microsites and internal IT systems; coordinated 4-6 vendors and internal staff.

Director of Engineering, Adfero (2011 – 2017) #

DC-based interactive marketing and government contracting firm. Joined as Engineer; promoted to Senior Engineer in 2012 and to Director in 2015.

  • Architected end-to-end and was hands-on lead engineer on Veterans' Affairs career development portal; platform served traffic in the millions with thousands of monthly signups. Owned day-to-day technical management after launch, vendor coordination, and roadmap direction.
  • Engineering lead on the DHS international student portal — paired with a dedicated technical lead on weekly architectural and roadmap planning. Platform remains in production a decade after delivery.
  • Led development and production support for dozens of websites and platforms for clients including Axios, Politico, Microsoft, AT&T, Ballmer Foundation, American Medical Association, and several federal agencies. (Primarily LAMP, with Node, Python, and Java applied as projects required.)
  • As Director, managed cross-functional team of software engineers, project managers, and QA engineers across concurrent client engagements.

Patents #

12 issued patents at Capital One spanning identity and authentication, blockchain and cryptography, augmented reality, and Bluetooth-beacon location services.

  • US 0019531 - Wayfinding And Location-Based Information Delivery Using Bluetooth Beacons
  • US 0064032 - Systems And Methods For Managing Metrics In Blockchain Networks
  • US 0068417 - Systems And Methods For A Bifurcated Model Architecture For Generating Concise, Natural Language Summaries Of Blocks Of Code
  • US 0164530 - Methods And Systems For Presenting User Specific Information Based On Mobile Device Proximity To Short-Range Wireless Technology Beacons
  • US 0219814 - Systems And Methods For Generating Shared Secret Key For Transaction Cards
  • US 0225513 - Systems And Methods For Validating Transactions
  • US 0247388 - Time-Based One-Time Password On Authentication Token
  • US 0256520 - Displaying Visual Indications Of Files Being Viewed Via An Augmented Reality Headset
  • US 0289444 - Systems And Methods For Preventing Communications With Malicious Cryptography-Based Storage Application Addresses Using Consensus
  • US 0289783 - Systems And Methods For Verifying Cryptographically Secured Communications Between Users Using Non-Transferable Tokens
  • US 0320929 - Augmented Reality Techniques To Identify A Merchant Category Code Associated With A Transaction
  • US 0342456 - Systems And Methods To Perform Registration Operations With Contactless Cards

Speaking, Writing & Press #

  • Capital One internal tech conference — multiple speaking appearances
  • GitHub Universe — speaker
  • All Things Open — speaker
  • Stanford Social Innovation Review — published article
  • Tom's Hardware — podcast appearance discussing a side project
  • Make Magazine — side project featured
  • Lifehacker — personal app showcased

Skills #

Focus areas

  • Identity, authentication, and contactless/NFC payment
  • Real-time and event-driven systems
  • AI/LLM integration in production environments
  • Multi-region cloud-native architecture and compliance readiness (SOC2)
  • iOS platform engineering (build tooling, bundle optimization)
  • Frontend engineering across multiple frameworks: React, Vue, Electron, native iOS and Android

Approach

  • Hands-on architecture and implementation regardless of title
  • Right-sized solutions over reflexive enterprise patterns
  • Cross-organizational technical influence including vendor engineering, regulators, and auditors
  • Stakeholder navigation across product, legal, cyber, compliance, and customers
  • Engineering mentorship and design leadership

Languages

Go, TypeScript / Node.js (expert); Python, Swift, Java, C/C++ (proficient)

Education #

Dickinson College — B.S. Computer Science (Graduated 2011) #

Annex: Technical Stack & Tools #

Languages

  • Expert: Go, TypeScript / Node.js, Python, SQL
  • Proficient: Swift, Java, C / C++

Frontend

  • Expert: React, Vue
  • Proficient: Electron, native iOS, native Android

Cloud & Infrastructure

  • Expert: AWS (ECS Fargate, EC2, Lambda, Aurora Postgres, KMS, SQS, SES, SNS, payment HSM, Route53), Terraform, Docker
  • Proficient: multi-service Docker Compose, Nginx, Serverless Framework, WireGuard

Data

  • Expert: PostgreSQL / Aurora Postgres, Redis / Valkey, DynamoDB
  • Proficient: MySQL, MongoDB, RabbitMQ, Airflow

LLMs & Applied AI

  • Expert: LLM integration in production (Anthropic Claude, OpenAI), prompt engineering, tool/function calling, structured output extraction, multi-model evaluation methodology
  • Proficient: Local LLM deployment (Ollama, llama.cpp), batch LLM extraction pipelines

DevOps & Observability

  • Expert: CI/CD (GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, Gitea/Forgejo Act runners), Docker, OpenAPI
  • Proficient: OpenTelemetry, NewRelic, structured logging (zap, slog, logrus)

Hardware & Embedded

  • Proficient: JavaCard, Multos, Arduino, PlatformIO, Raspberry Pi, ESP32, CircuitPython, sensor integration, MQTT, IoT protocols, BLE, NFC