Perry Johnson
AI & Data Engineer·Missoula, MT
Hey, I’m Perry, an AI and data engineer who loves working with great people to solve meaningful problems. I currently lead AI engineering at Digital Iron, building the systems and data infrastructure that turn raw equipment service data into smarter aftersales and upkeep for heavy machinery.
Before that I co-founded Fishtail, a trade finance platform that automated back-office operations and de-risked global trade with supply chain data. Earlier I led data science at Farm Dog (acquired by Deveron), building the infrastructure and field tools that helped agronomists track pest and disease pressure.
Now
I live in Missoula, Montana. In my free time you can find me hiking, climbing, snowboarding and exploring wilderness areas. Lately I’ve been digging into:
- Regenerative agriculture
- Wildfire mitigation
- Supply chain efficiency
- Preventive healthcare
Experience
Lead AI Engineer at Digital Iron
Building a scalable platform that ingests and structures messy equipment service data, then powers agentic search and predictive analytics on top, backed by resilient multi-model pipelines and a custom evaluation framework for improving the system.
ML Engineer and Co-founder at Fishtail
- Built a document understanding engine to extract structured data from unstructured documents in any format
- Developed a reconciliation engine to automate trade finance repayments
- Created a global port health index to monitor risk across maritime supply chains
Lead Data Scientist at Farm Dog
Built data pipelines and in-field tools to support agronomists with real-time pest and disease insights.
Contract Projects
- Built a configurable Python library to stress test hospital software by simulating patient flows across dynamic hospital layouts
- Worked with a leading radiologist to build an image-segmentation model that maps colorectal anatomy and detects lymphoma lesions
- Optimized SQL queries on an EV battery analytics platform to run 11x faster, unlocking real-time charging cost analysis
Quant Analyst at Strix Leviathan
Built and backtested algorithmic trading strategies across a wide range of cryptocurrency markets.
Personal Projects
- Bird Scooter Nest Generator: A web app that predicts where scooters cluster into charging nests and recommends new drop-off spots, trained on a dataset I built from scooter locations across four cities
- Reverse Engineering the Walk Score Algorithm: Reverse-engineered Walk Score’s black-box walkability metric by building a dataset of ~7,800 Seattle locations and modeling what drives the score (R² 0.95), revealing what actually makes a neighborhood walkable
- Hiking Recommendation System: A personalized recommendation engine for hiking trails (“Netflix for hikes”) that learns from ~3,500 Washington hikes and 200k user reviews
Tech Stack
- Languages: Python, Go, TypeScript, SQL, Bash
- AI & ML: PyTorch, scikit-learn, Weights & Biases, OpenAI, Anthropic, Llama, Hugging Face
- Data & pipelines: Airflow, Dagster, PostgreSQL, Redis, vector search (Weaviate, Meilisearch), geospatial (GIS)
- Backend & infra: FastAPI, Django, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform
- Cloud: AWS, GCP, Supabase
Contact
If you’re working on something interesting or want to chat, reach out at perryrjohnson7@gmail.com.