Data foundations and AI systems that hold up in production.
Pine Marten is the independent practice of John Houghton, a senior data engineer with a decade of work at Meta, Apple, Kaiser Permanente and Intuit. I design pipelines, analytics and AI systems — including private, on-prem AI that keeps your data in your building.
What I help with
Meta quantum cryptography systems
Post-quantum migration for production data systems: crypto-agility audits, key-management and pipeline encryption inventories, and harvest-now-decrypt-later risk assessment against NIST ML-KEM and ML-DSA.
ML-KEM / ML-DSAcrypto-agilityHNDL riskkey inventoryData engineering
Modern pipelines and warehouses: ingestion, dbt modeling, orchestration, testing and CI — built to be owned by your team.
dbtDagsterDuckDBSQLAI engineering
LLM features, agents and evaluation harnesses wired into real workflows, with dataset curation and guardrails from day one.
LLMsagentsevalsLocal & private AI
On-device speech, vision and language models on Apple Silicon or your own hardware — no data leaves the premises.
on-premSTT/TTSvisionAnalytics & decision support
Metrics, experiments and dashboards grounded in economics — so the numbers answer the questions leadership actually asks.
metricsexperimentationSmall, senior, hands-on
Assess
A short, fixed-scope review of your data and goals, ending in a written plan with clear priorities.
Build
I work in your repos and tools, shipping in small increments with tests and documentation.
Hand off
Runbooks, walkthroughs and a team that can extend the system without me.
TODO
Hi, I'm John.
I've spent my career turning messy data into dependable systems — most recently supporting FAIR and Reality Labs at Meta, and before that Apple Maps, Kaiser Permanente and Intuit. I trained as an economist, so I care about the decision the data serves, not just the pipeline.
Have a data or AI problem worth solving?
Send a few lines about what you're working on. I reply within one business day.