Hello, I'm Fielding Johnston. With over 15 years of experience, I specialize in building scalable AI infrastructure, healthcare platforms, and distributed systems. Currently I'm building a privacy-first generative AI platform at Venice.ai. I care deeply about AI adoption, not just shipping AI-powered products, but helping the teams around me get better at using AI every day.
See what I’m building after hours, or dig into my experience, publications, and projects below.
Find me on GitHub, Google Scholar, LinkedIn, or grab my Resume. Want to work together, build something cool, or just chat? Reach out at hello@justfielding.com.
As of March 2026
Code is no longer the bottleneck. That changes what's worth building. I've been circling around four areas: highlighting human intent so it isn't lost, encoding constraints so they're enforced automatically, empowering agents to build faster, and eliminating the review bottleneck entirely.
human++ is a color scheme and editor extension built around the idea that code is cheap and intent is scarce. sigil is still finding its shape, somewhere between ADRs and a knowledge graph. nit makes what agents do cheaper. sprawl lets them do it together. review-crew has been a really successful experiment in multi-model adversarial code review. And clipside is a project built entirely by a team of agents (using most of the tools above) so I could watch them work.
I Almost Killed redstone.university Editing the Figures by Hand Jul 6 2026·9 min read
The Interview Was the Payload Apr 7 2026·20 min read
Working across privacy, data protection, and inference infrastructure for Venice's generative AI platform.
Built Anon Email, a relay and masking layer that keeps real user addresses out of third-party systems while mail still reaches the same inbox.
Building Identity Guard, which replaces sensitive data with stable placeholders before it reaches AI providers, then restores it in the response.
Rewriting Venice's inference infrastructure in Rust.
Founding member of a 4-person team that built a greenfield patient communications platform; selected as the company's top strategic bet and scaled to a larger team.
Built end-to-end voice and SMS infrastructure including patient identification with dual validation, AI-initiated call transfer, two-way SMS with TCPA-compliant consent, and PHI screening via LLM.
Shipped BigQuery analytics pipeline as source of truth for pilot metrics, integrating sentiment analysis and call evaluation criteria, and fixing duration reporting accuracy from 0% to 100%.
Designed care collaboration workflows with PostgreSQL RLS and role-based access, enabling multi-clinician visit collaboration with realtime patient updates.
Created and shipped '12 Business Days of AI,' a 12-day internal engineering campaign with guest contributors teaching advanced AI patterns, shifting the team from shadow AI usage to documented shared mastery.
Architected a distributed inference framework for 120,000 models across heterogeneous hardware, handling up to 2M inference requests in a single day.
Designed and implemented Nesa's layer 1 blockchain, enabling decentralized compute for AI workloads.
Developed telemetry pipeline using NATS.io and Prometheus to monitor thousands of nodes.
Led secure containerization for user-submitted models.
Contributed to equivariant encryption (EE) for end-to-end private AI inference with zero-latency overhead.
Developed reinforcement learning system for dynamic model assignment.
Contributed to open-source projects including xFusers and nats.py.
Led Unity-based lunar colony simulation game development.
Designed and implemented 3D environments and shaders.
Built AI systems for dynamic NPCs with procedural behaviors.
Directed art team and coordinated UI/UX integration.
Refactored codebase to Svelte, improving performance for 14M+ monthly users.
Developed custodial wallet system for user transactions.
Implemented NLP for ad placement to boost engagement.
Engineered fine-grained reactive vanilla JS framework.
Built and scaled web apps integrating React and Three.js.
Advocated open-source frameworks to reduce tech debt.
Managed technical, design, and business operations.
Y. Du, Z. Wang, A. Farhan, F. Johnston, et al.. COLM 2025.
J. Buban, H. Zhang, C. Angione, F. Johnston, et al.. arXiv preprint, 2025.
C. Angione, Y. Zhao, H. Yang, F. Johnston, et al.. MLforSys2024.
H. Zhang, Y. Zhao, C. Yang, F. Johnston, et al.. NeurIPS 2024 Workshop RBFM.
A steampunk pirate-themed multiplayer Yahtzee game built as a Telegram Mini App and available as a web app. Along with scratching a personal itch, I wanted to explore the potential of multiplayer games as Telegram Mini Apps and the outreach they can provide. Also, steampunk pirates!
Fite.bet reinvents online giveaways by transforming them from a simple random name(s) picker into an epic 8-bit fighting game tournament between the participants' AI-generated sprite representations. I took this opportunity to explore various diffusion model pipelines for dynamic asset generation in games and apps. It's a service that prioritizes both being awesome and offering utility.
An experimental UI control system that allows users to interact with web applications using real-life hand gestures via their webcam. This proof-of-concept leverages a lightweight, browser-based neural network for real-time gesture detection to control a rock-paper-scissors game without any physical input.
A satirical game concept exploring gesture-based controls. "Zuck Hunt" is a light-gun style shooter (a la Duck Hunt) controlled by hand gestures, while "Zuck's Revenge" flips the script into a side-scrolling beat-'em-up. Both are explorations in creative art direction and novel user interaction.
A lunar colony simulation game with dynamic AI-driven NPCs. This project showcases my versatility. Acting as the lead engineer and also directing the overall design and direction of the project, I had the opportunity to touch literally every aspect of the game, from shaders to the art, style and lore of the game.
A free, hands-on online course teaching computer architecture fundamentals through Minecraft’s Redstone system. Build registers, logic gates, and an ALU in-game, making concepts like binary and bitwise operations tangible. Created for my daughter, CS students, and anyone seeking a practical grasp of low-level computing.