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JOHN ROY
SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA
AI Engineer · Technical Leader · Fractional CTO
John Roy
Twenty-five years building software — engineer, consultant, founder, tech lead. These days I build AI agents and the tooling around them, and lead the teams that ship them.
MA COMPUTER SCIENCE · TRINITY COLLEGE DUBLIN
SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA · REMOTE FRIENDLY
John Roy
About
These days I'm deep in agentic AI and applied engineering. Currently focused on autonomous skills evolution (SkillOpt). I build production systems, not prototypes — AI-native, not vibe-coded. With modern AI tooling I ship at 2-3x senior engineer velocity, equivalent to a team of 4-6. I take on engagements via SOW and have kick-started multiple 0-to-1 startup projects successfully.
CS grad. 25+ years across software engineering, management consulting, founding, and technical leadership. I've been a developer, CTO, CEO, VP Eng, systems architect, PM, angel investor, and leadership coach — sometimes in the same year.
On the people side: I help technical teams get unstuck. Seven years in management consulting gave me a structural understanding of how teams break and how to fix them. I build happy, productive teams. I've coached and intervened at every level — from fixing toxic culture to scaling growing orgs — backed by deep study in psychology and communication.
Master of Arts (MA) in Computer Science from Trinity College Dublin with a year of that in Germany via German language. Based in the beautiful East Bay Hills of San Francisco with my family, dog, and a winery next door.
What I do
AI Engineering
Agents, tool use and MCP, context engineering, evaluation. OpenAI and Anthropic APIs, with a bias toward Claude agent tooling and skill systems.
Technical Leadership
Fractional CTO and tech lead. Architecture, delivery, hiring and mentoring.
0 → 1 Delivery
Greenfield to production against a real deadline. AI integratons, eCommerce, SaaS platforms.
Selected work
2024 — NOW
Consultant · CleverDev
Independent AI engineering: built 46a, a no-code agentic platform, alongside client automations and AI tooling for startups and SMBs.
2020 — 2023
Tech Lead · Joy
Co-led the wedding registry commerce platform that became the company's flagship and sole revenue source. Mentored engineers and project managers across a 75-person team.
2019 — 2020
Tech Lead · BASF (Contract)
Owned 0-to-1 delivery of a cosmetics SaaS platform — greenfield to production in under twelve months with a team of five.
2018 — 2019
Senior Engineer · Stride (Contract)
Delivered a federal healthcare.gov integration on time for the open enrollment deadline.
2014 — 2017
Tech Lead · Nimblefish
HTML5 mobile product streaming dynamically composed video. Led a team of five, hands-on across full stack and mobile.
2012 — 2014
Co-founder & CTO · Callspring, BabelRoom
Two startups delivering HD video conferencing with social integration. Built the cloud platform end to end — billing and support included.
2002 — 2012
Engineer · Consultant · Founder
Co-founder & CTO of NVision in Dublin, grown to $2M revenue. Senior consultant to Fortune 100 leadership. Oracle server engineering.
~1998
An early free SSL-enabled HTTP server — a world first. Open source, still archived at SourceForge.
< 1998
Client Server Integrations, Team lead
At Cambridge Technology Partners (Cambridge, MA), I grew from an entry-level software engineer to a team lead and management consultant. We built cutting-edge solutions to integrate legacy systems for Fortune 100 clients. The role morphed into a team lead and, ultimately, a team problem-resolution capacity.
Current work
Build and ship web software by describing it. Objects, pages and projects an agent can author directly, with a REST API, an MCP server and a skill system so the AI can do the work end to end.
AGENTS · MCP · CONTEXT ENGINEERING · REACT · NODE · POSTGRES
Writing
Building a voice-reading app on 46a, end to end — what the platform does for you and where you still write the code.
DEC0DE.SUBSTACK.COM
Longer pieces on engineering practice, AI tooling and how technical teams break and get fixed.
MEDIUM.COM
Get in touch
Open to fractional CTO work, AI engineering engagements and technical leadership — San Francisco Bay Area, hybrid or remote.
© 2026 JOHN ROY
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