Noah B. Johnson
Engineering lead building high-performing teams and resilient, scalable platforms
Madison, Wisconsin, United States
Summary
Engineering lead and hands-on systems architect. At FORM I built much of the image recognition platform as an engineer and now lead it; it serves hundreds of the world's top brands and costs about half what it did when I joined. I grow engineers by giving them ownership of whole systems and guarding the focus that takes. I ship code through agentic engineering, and I created the harness and practices that made it the default across my team.
Experience
FORM
Remote · Aug 2022 to present
Lead Software Engineer
Apr 2026 to present
- Lead the team that owns FORM's image recognition platform, from public APIs through workflow orchestration and reporting, at a scale of ~25M images a month, producing ~250M tags and bounding boxes
- Oversaw the migration of image recognition orchestration to Temporal, which halved processing latency; the median is now ~10 seconds and every image finishes within 5 minutes
- Led my team's integration work through FORM's merger with Trax: brought Trax's image recognition into our pipeline, designed the API contracts between the two companies' systems and coordinated across business units to consolidate processing onto one architecture
- Built the team's Claude Code workspace of specialist agents, skills and shared practices
- Shape system design and architecture with our principal engineer and product partner, and run technical spikes to de-risk work before the team commits
- Take on high-impact projects outside the product roadmap, shipping full-stack solutions ahead of productization without pulling the team off its priorities; the latest, a planogram ingestion and product-matching tool, should save solutions and professional services teams thousands of hours
- Manage 6 direct reports across 1:1s, performance reviews and career development
- Doubled the team from 3 to 6; new hires ship to production within their first two weeks
- Partner with product and engineering leadership at the department and executive levels on planning, priorities and resourcing, and with customer success teams on new use cases
Senior Software Engineer
Apr 2025 to Apr 2026
- Technical lead for the image recognition platform's architecture and roadmap; defined the service contracts between the ML, web, mobile and reporting teams that depend on it
- Architected and led delivery of IRaaS, FORM's external image recognition API, built for 100x traffic bursts; partnered with Google Cloud engineering to validate its scaling behavior at volume
- Designed a configurable orchestration layer and wrote the region-migration playbook on top of it, carrying processing through multiple regional degradations with no downtime
- Incident commander for most production incidents; unified GCP monitoring and PagerDuty alerting
- Championed company-wide Go standards; mentored, onboarded and interviewed engineers
Software Engineer
Aug 2022 to Apr 2025
- Led the zero-downtime move from a homegrown orchestrator to Google Cloud Workflows, which became the foundation for the image recognition pipeline and IRaaS
- Wrote the Python data validation framework that compared outputs across the old and new pipelines to verify parity through the migration
- Designed the system of record for image recognition configs, inputs and model outputs alongside our principal engineer
- Migrated PhotoWorks, FORM's reporting app, from NoSQL to Postgres with zero data loss and zero downtime, not even a maintenance window
- Normalized the PhotoWorks domain model, making responses 5x faster for large enterprise customers
- Cut service downtime ~95% through architecture and stack upgrades, ending the multi-day PhotoWorks ingestion outages that were common when I joined
- Brought PhotoWorks ingest and operations costs down ~90%
Kion
Remote
GCP Software Engineer
Sep 2020 to Jul 2022
- Built Google Cloud support into Kion's cloud governance product from scratch and owned it from architecture through customer escalations
- Wrote the microservices and internal SDKs behind it, and led company-wide education on GCP architecture and best practices
- Shipped full-stack features in Go and Angular
Open Source
Genealogix (GLX)
Creator and lead maintainer
An open standard and Go CLI for collaborative, Git-native genealogy archives, designed to succeed GEDCOM: YAML records validated by JSON Schema, GEDCOM import and export, search, citations and a local viewer. Apache 2.0.
Skills
Leadership
- Engineering management
- Technical leadership
- People development
- Cross-functional leadership
- Incident command
Engineering
- Full-stack development
- Distributed systems and solution architecture
- API design
- Event-driven systems
- Observability
- AI agents and agentic engineering
Stack
- Go
- TypeScript
- JavaScript
- React
- Python
- SQL
- Google Cloud Platform
- Terraform
- Temporal
- PostgreSQL
- OpenSearch
- Apache Kafka
Education
Luther College
Data Science, Computer Science minor · 2015 to 2019