About

Hi there 👋

I'm JJ. I'm Director, Applied AI at Google DeepMind, based in Singapore. My team pushes the technical boundaries of DeepMind's models. We work across all of them (Gemini, Gemma, WeatherNext, MetNet and more), and everything we build aims to stay six months or more ahead of their out-of-the-box capabilities.

Before this

Meta, Singapore. I started on WhatsApp Business, exploring AI adoption and working on WhatsApp Flows and the developer tools and SDKs. Then I moved to Ad Signal, working on Meta Pixel and other behavioral signals for ad targeting. Finally I was a technical advisor to the COO, Javi Olivan, working on exploratory AI projects in Singapore aimed at new Asia-focused business lines.

Google Payments, Singapore. I led Google's contributions to Mojaloop, an open-source real-time payment system, and represented Google on the Mojaloop Foundation's Technical Governing Board. Much of the job was advising governments, central banks and regulators on real-time payments and third-party payment initiation.

Google Cloud, New York. I led the API design team across Alphabet and started AIP.dev, the API Improvement Proposals that describe how Google designs its APIs. We also built the Google Cloud client libraries in seven languages.

Google Display Ads, New York. Google acquired Invite Media in 2010. I led east coast engineering for what became DoubleClick Bid Manager, including the move from Amazon EC2 onto Google's infrastructure.

Invite Media, Philadelphia. I was VP of Engineering at a startup building the first "universal buying platform" for display ads, bidding in real time across multiple ad exchanges.

Things I've made

API Design Patterns (Manning, 2021), plus free solutions to the exercises
Google Cloud Platform in Action (Manning, 2018)
AIP.dev, Google's public API design guidance
Research on AI-assisted API design (CHI '26), API governance (ICSE '24) and third-party payment initiation (Google, 2021)

Tools of the trade

I've written a lot of Python, Dart, JavaScript and TypeScript, and some Java. Lately I'm most interested in AI-powered development and design tools, and I keep meaning to learn Rust properly.

Get in touch

Ask me about applied AI, API design, payments, or software engineering in general. Email is best: jj@geewax.org. I'm also on LinkedIn, GitHub and X.

If you're organizing an event, the speaking page has bios and everything else you'll need.

Pronouns: he/him.