$ cat ~/about.md
Jason Johndrow
Principal AI Engineer @ Sphere AI Solutions·Brighton, Colorado
These days I'm helping build private AI that institutions can trust with their own knowledge — nearly three decades in, still getting my hands dirty, and still sure most of it is a team sport.
I'm Principal AI Engineer at Sphere AI Solutions, where I'm helping build OrgBrain, Sphere's private AI platform for governments, development banks, the UN, NGOs, and enterprises that can't hand their knowledge to a public chatbot. It answers from an organization's own documents and data, inside its own walls, with a citation behind every answer — and its desktop app includes The Forge, where people build apps on top of their own data.
Before Sphere I spent just over a decade as a principal engineer at ClearDATA, helping build and harden the HITRUST-certified cloud that healthcare organizations use to protect patient data and automate compliance. Different domain, same job: regulated, large-scale, real-world systems where correctness and trust are the whole point.
Further back, the path runs through a lot of good teams: architecting a multi-tenant commerce platform on Azure, consulting on fault-tolerant clouds back when “cloud” was still a new word, working alongside a global IT team through the semiconductor years as a hundred-person startup grew past a thousand — and, at the very start, helping keep an Air Force base network alive. The title kept changing — network admin, architect, principal engineer — but the work never did: learn the system end to end, then help make it correct, fast, and trustworthy. I've been lucky to do it next to people a lot sharper than me, and I've never stopped learning from them.
Off the clock I build real-time agentic systems for the love of it. Most of all there's Ember, a continuously-running AI with a 100 ms heartbeat, governed capabilities, and a memory of its own — and Embers Wonderland, a world model where her cast lives, works, and talks with you, built on a physics engine that keeps evolving. The rest of what I'm making lives on the projects page — including the black hole on the home screen, which is a real-time general-relativistic ray tracer, not a video.
$ neofetch
jason@johndrow.net
- OS:
- Human, Brighton CO
- Uptime:
- 29 years in tech (since 1997)
- Host:
- Sphere AI Solutions
- Role:
- Principal AI Engineer
- Kernel:
- Computer Science, Univ. of Central Oklahoma
- Langs:
- .NET · Java · Python · TypeScript
- Clouds:
- Azure · AWS · GCP · OCI
- SCM:
- SourceSafe → CVS → SVN → git
- Compliance:
- HITRUST · HIPAA · SOX
- Projects:
- 7 (2 members-only)
- Music:
- Grateful Dead · Phish · classic rock · EDM · punk
- Fuel:
- coffee (∞)
$ cat ~/now.md
- building
- OrgBrain at Sphere by day; Ember and Embers Wonderland by night — and this site, which keeps growing a terminal.
- exploring
- the geometry sound draws in matter, over in Harmonic Geometry.
- listening
- the Grateful Dead and Phish, on heavy rotation.
# updated November 2026 — inspired by nownownow.com
$ git log --graph --oneline ~/career
Helping build OrgBrain, Sphere's private AI platform: institutional AI that governments, multilateral development banks, the UN, and NGOs trust with their own knowledge — their data, their rules, their infrastructure. Sphere is deployed across 30+ countries and 95 languages.
Just over a decade helping build and harden the HITRUST-certified healthcare cloud that providers, payers, and pharma rely on to protect patient data and automate compliance — posture management, PHI governance, and managed detection across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.
- Full-Stack Developer & Chief Architect·Romman Inc.2012 – 2016scm:git
Architected a custom multi-tenant eCommerce platform on .NET and Azure, and ran the infrastructure behind a portfolio of web stores.
- Microsoft Cloud Architect·Johndrow Consulting2009 – 2012scm:git
Independent cloud consultant for System Center and Hyper-V — built “single pane of glass” tooling, and taught hosting providers to build fault-tolerant clouds, including classes at Microsoft's Redmond campus. Clients included Microsoft and Terremark.
Merge branch 'subversion' into git~2009
- Head of IT & Acting Director·SigmaTel2003 – 2008scm:svn
Joined as employee #109 and watched the company grow past 1,000 before the Freescale acquisition. Led a global IT and DevOps team across 11 sites, Austin to Shenzhen — together we virtualized the network, stood up a 100+ node Linux compute cluster for engineering sims, and made it through SOX. Getting to lead a team that good was the best part.
Merge branch 'cvs' into subversion~2004
- Team Lead & Technical Architect·Meritage Technologies2000 – 2003scm:cvs
Led small teams building custom enterprise software in C#, .NET, and Java for clients like Schlumberger and AMD.
Merge branch 'sourcesafe' into cvs~2000
- Supervisor, Network Administration·Northrop Grumman · Vance AFB1997 – 2000scm:vss
Cut my teeth as part of the crew that kept the base network running for the 71st Flying Training Wing — I grew from network specialist into supervising it, but keeping that many systems alive was the work of a lot of great people. Along the way I shipped a couple of applications for the Air Force and picked up the habit of automating everything (now called DevOps).
Computer Science · University of Central Oklahoma
$ grep -i focus ~/.me
$ cat ~/offline.txt
I'm endlessly curious about how the world actually works. Math, geometry, physics, and a little philosophy are hobbies as much as tools — it's why the home page renders a real general-relativistic black hole, and why one of my projects is a lab for the geometry that sound draws in matter. I love a problem that sends me back to first principles.
And there's almost always something playing — I'm deep into the Grateful Dead and Phish, with a wide net that pulls in classic rock, EDM, and punk. Mostly I try to stay grateful: for the people I get to build and learn alongside, for a field that never stops teaching me, and for a life with a lot of love in it.