Perry Johnson
Principal AI Engineer·Missoula, MT
Hey, I’m Perry. I’m an AI engineer with 8+ years of experience, mostly at early-stage startups in industries that deal with physical things and very messy data: heavy machinery, agriculture, shipping and trade finance.
Currently I’m at Digital Iron, where we’re building an AI platform for heavy machinery maintenance and parts. Before that I built trade finance tools at Fishtail and led data science at Farm Dog.
Experience
Principal AI Engineer at Digital Iron
Building the AI system end to end, from ingesting messy service records and integrations to the query engine and fleet analytics customers use.
- An agentic query engine that answers questions across structured and unstructured data and cites the source tickets
- A document pipeline that turns service tickets into structured data and recovers on its own from worker and provider failures
- An offline evaluation bench for fine-tuning that tests candidate models, prompts and settings against the current system before they ship
- Learned embedding compression that shrinks vectors 6x while improving retrieval quality
- An algorithmic fleet intelligence engine that finds failure chains, repeat offenders and cost anomalies across a customer’s machines
Co-founder and ML Engineer at Fishtail
Built the data and ML systems behind a trade finance platform for SMB shippers and forwarders.
- A document engine that turns unstructured trade documents into structured data, at first using a fine-tuned vision transformer, then swapped out for fine-tuned LLMs
- Entity matching that canonicalizes company names across 100M+ bills of lading, using a transformer fine-tuned on internally labeled data
- Voyage reconstruction from raw vessel tracking data, and a global port health index that monitors risk across maritime supply chains
- A reconciliation system that automates trade finance repayments
Lead Data Scientist at Farm Dog (acquired by Deveron)
- A geospatial data pipeline that kept agronomists’ field observations and weather flowing from the production app into PostGIS
- Pest and disease severity scoring, trend detection and alerts for outbreaks near a farm’s fields, with a map-based app on top
Advising and Contract Work
- Advising on LLM architecture: structured outputs, provider-agnostic design, evals and where LLMs should and shouldn’t make decisions
- Credit risk signal discovery across years of transaction and payment data
- An image-segmentation model that maps colorectal anatomy and detects lesions, built with a leading cancer radiologist
- A Python library that stress-tests hospital software by simulating patient flows across dynamic hospital layouts
Quantitative Analyst at Strix Leviathan
Built and backtested algorithmic trading strategies across 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
- Reverse Engineering Walk Score: Modeling a black-box walkability metric to find what actually makes a neighborhood walkable
- Hiking Recommendation System: “Netflix for hikes,” a personalized recommendation engine for trails
Skills
- Languages: Python, Go, TypeScript, SQL
- LLM systems: Fine-tuning, embeddings, RAG and agentic retrieval, evals, structured outputs, multimodal/VLM pipelines, provider fallbacks, retries, circuit breakers, caching
- ML: PyTorch, Hugging Face, vision transformers, document AI and OCR, entity resolution
- Math & statistics: Statistical inference, regression, hypothesis testing, experiment design, econometrics, linear algebra, optimization
- Data & pipelines: ETL, Airflow, Dagster, Celery, SQS, PostgreSQL, PostGIS, Redis, vector search (Meilisearch, Weaviate, pgvector)
- Systems & infra: Distributed, fault-tolerant pipelines, system architecture, Django, FastAPI, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, AWS, GCP
Outside Work
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 and preventive healthcare.
Contact
If you’re working on something interesting or want to chat, reach out at perryrjohnson7@gmail.com.