John Houghton
Senior data and AI engineer in San Diego. Economist by training, builder by habit. Available for consulting engagements and select full-time roles.
Things I've built
SD Open Data Pipeline
End-to-end pipeline for San Diego open data: Dagster orchestration, dbt models, DuckDB spatial joins to council districts, and CI with full test coverage.
DagsterdbtDuckDB spatialCIsd-open-data-pipeline
LLM Dataset Curation
Config-driven curation for language-model datasets: normalization, exact and MinHash near-dedupe, Gopher/C4 quality filters, PII redaction, toxicity filtering and an eval report.
LLMsdata qualityllm-dataset-curation
Vision Lab · Local AI Showcase
Real-time camera vision and voice agents running fully on-device on a Mac Studio M3 Ultra, with event recording, data-quality checks and privacy redaction.
on-devicevisionvoicevision-lab
Finance Wizard
An agent-first personal finance app: FastAPI and React with interactive ECharts models, scenarios and dashboards.
FastAPIReactagentsfinance-wizard-demo
Personal Finance Lake
A local lakehouse on DuckDB and dbt that ingests bank feeds, enriches transactions and reconciles them nightly.
DuckDBdbtlaunchdfinance-lake-demo
Multi-Agent Assistant
A team of cooperating AI agents for research, scheduling, note-keeping and security review, with human approval on every outbound action.
agentsorchestrationmulti-agent-assistant
Distributed Multimedia ETL Pipeline
Distributed image ETL on LAION-400M samples: Spark hashing and metadata extraction, exact and perceptual near-dedupe, WebP compression, and Delta Lake medallion tables orchestrated by Airflow.
SparkDelta LakeAirflowDistributed-Multimedia-ETL-Pipeline
Multi-Provider LangChain
FastAPI and LangChain backend with a lightweight web UI for switching between Anthropic and xAI models at runtime, with chat, canvas and real-time Grok voice modes.
LangChainFastAPIvoicemulti-provider-langchain
Where I've worked
Education & training
B.A. Economics
San Diego State University, 2011
Machine Learning Specialization
University of Washington, 2017
Data Mining Certificate
UC San Diego Extension, 2017
Outside the terminal
Local-first and private AI, economics and markets, civic open data, and rare books. TODO confirm / add interests (e.g. endurance sports)