# Jonathan Popham - Systems & AI Engineer

> I build deterministic infrastructure around probabilistic systems: memory you own, airgap-capable cores, and verification with the evidence attached.

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## About

Jonathan Popham is a systems and AI engineer. His lane is deterministic understanding and verification: code that has to be right, and provably so. He works in Rust when correctness matters (zero-dependency, forbid(unsafe), byte-stable) and across the stack when it doesn't. He is most useful where AI throughput meets senior-engineer judgment, when someone has to make the machine's output trustworthy before it ships.

## Current Work: The Ghostie Stack

A local-first AI stack: small tools that each do one thing well and snap together into a loop (understand, render, remember, act, prove). Overview: https://jonathanpopham.com/stack

### Lockstep (prove)
Behavioral-equivalence certificates for code migration. Runs a program and its rewrite over an explicit corpus, compares them at the observable boundary, and issues a deterministic, hash-chained, replayable certificate with Ed25519 signing. Rust, std-only, zero dependencies, MIT.
- GitHub: https://github.com/jonathanpopham/lockstep

### ghostie (remember)
Provider-agnostic agent memory you own: context that persists across sessions, agents, and devices in a store you can read and carry. Deterministic recall with why-explanations, session capture, git sync, hooks. Rust, std-only, zero dependencies.
- GitHub: https://github.com/jonathanpopham/ghostie-rs

### Nightshift (act)
Behavior-preserving migration orchestrator. Freezes a behavioral contract, drives the candidate through Lockstep, and refuses rather than guess when it cannot verify. The loop closes end to end in public CI.
- GitHub: https://github.com/jonathanpopham/nightshift

### Ontoloom (render)
Airgapped, dependency-free ontology and knowledge-graph builder with a visual browser GUI on localhost and Neo4j-compatible exports (JSONL / Cypher / JSON / GraphML). Rust, std-only.
- GitHub: https://github.com/jonathanpopham/ontoloom

### gatekit (the standard)
The stack's verification discipline packaged for any project: one self-dogfooding CI gate script with byte-stability and tamper checks.
- GitHub: https://github.com/jonathanpopham/gatekit

## Other Projects

### onehand
Control your Mac from your phone with one hand. Phone becomes a trackpad and dictation mic over a LAN-only WebSocket bridge. PIN-paired, no cloud, no accounts.
- GitHub: https://github.com/jonathanpopham/onehand

### Syllabus
Turns a job posting link into a self-contained interview-prep course: company/culture primer plus runnable coding exercises per interview stage. One agent skill that runs unmodified in Claude Code and Hermes.
- GitHub: https://github.com/jonathanpopham/syllabus

### anime-lakehouse
Medallion lakehouse + dbt star schema + LLM enrichment with trace-based evals, behind a five-gate CI lattice. DuckDB locally, Databricks (Delta / Unity Catalog) for deploy. MIT.
- GitHub: https://github.com/jonathanpopham/anime-lakehouse

### beckon
Open-source Raycast alternative for macOS with zero dependencies: two std-only Rust crates, hand-rolled Objective-C FFI, deterministic integer ranking with frecency, clipboard history, window management, menu-item search, and an any-language JSON-RPC plugin protocol. MIT.
- GitHub: https://github.com/jonathanpopham/beckon

## Experience

- Founding Engineer, Supermodel (Jan 2025 to May 2026): first engineering hire at a code-intelligence startup, pre-product. Designed the LLM-driven domain classification behind the /v1/graphs/domain public endpoint; built the parse, dependency, and call graphs behind four production endpoints; kept a 50,000-node code graph correct under live edits via a git-based, retry-safe incremental pipeline; authored the dead-code benchmark (60+ runs across 14 production repos up to 138K-star monorepos: 94.1% avg F1 at 100% precision, 156x cheaper and 11x faster than the baseline agent).
- Principal, Scale Factor LLC (Mar 2022 to present): software engineering R&D consultancy in Sylvester, Georgia.

## Background

- BS Mathematics, Indiana University (Real Analysis, Abstract Algebra, Topology, Probability Theory)
- AS Computer Science, Georgia State University
- GDG Atlanta founder
- Speaker at DevNexus, Connect.js, CodeMash

## Contact

- GitHub: https://github.com/jonathanpopham
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathan-popham-39878079/
- Contra: https://contra.com/scalefactorllc_am4ehwsm
- X: https://x.com/jonathanpopham
- Email: jonathan.popham@gmail.com
- Website: https://jonathanpopham.com
- Writing: https://jonathanpopham.com/blog/