About

John Mertens is a highly skilled Director of Engineering with over 16 years of relevant experience. He is currently working as the Principal Engineer (Machine Learning / AI) at Change.org, where he oversees all technical aspects of the organization. John is responsible for building and scaling various systems, including an API that serves millions of requests a day, a system to analyze and model semi-structured text, an ad-network-scale analytics system, and an API that auto-categorizes pieces of text. He also manages a team of remote developers, creates open source tools, and blogs about the problems they solve. Prior to joining Change.org, John was the CTO and Co-founder of Versa, a company that was acquired by Change.org. He played a crucial role in building and scaling various systems, including an API that serves millions of requests a day, an ad-network-scale analytics system, and an API that auto-categorizes pieces of text. He also managed a team of remote developers, created open source tools, and worked closely with product and design teams. John has also worked as a Senior Engineer (front end) at LocBox, where he was responsible for developing user-facing interfaces on the merchant portal, administrator portal, and company website. He has a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Iowa State University. John has a diverse tech stack, including AI, ML, Javascript, Ruby, AWS, Redis, MongoDB, and more. He is a skilled software engineer, front-end developer, and researcher. John is passionate about solving complex technical problems and creating innovative solutions. He has a strong track record of delivering high-quality work and collaborating effectively with cross-functional teams.