About Me · John Stowers

Hey, I’m John. I’m based in Cambridge, UK, and I build things. Usually real-time systems that watch something, model it, work out what is going on, and then act on it quickly and reliably. Always full-stack. The stacks have changed a lot over the years; the shape of the work has not. I like the seams where two stacks or domains meet, because that is usually where the reliability problems, and the interesting edges, turn up.

I grew up on a dairy farm in a small town called Te Aroha, New Zealand. I studied at the University of Canterbury: first a B.E. in Electrical Engineering with First Class Honours (2005), then a Masters of Engineering Management (2007) looking at commercialising and monetising open source projects, including open source hardware designs. My PhD, also at Canterbury (2012), was “Biologically Inspired Visual Control of Flying Robots”; mostly biologically inspired vision for the navigation and control of quadrotors. Along the way I was lucky to spend time at ETH Zurich and ENAC, and to do a fair bit of hardware, real-time positioning and drone work in New Zealand and Europe.

After that I moved to Vienna for a postdoc (2012 to 2016), split between the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology and TU Wien. The work was real-time 3D tracking, virtual reality and machine-learning pipelines, used for system identification of visual flight behaviour in Drosophila.

In 2015 I co-founded Loopbio and spent the next eight years as its CTO. We were a small bootstrapped team of about five, building a real-time python image-processing and computer-vision platform for the life sciences; deep-learning video analysis and real-time animal tracking.

Since 2024 I have been the hands-on CTO of a quantitative digital-assets hedge fund. I built the trade execution and simulation, the data warehousing and backtesting, and the AI and agentic systems we use for research, monitoring and operations, from scratch, spanning on-prem and cloud. Same shape as before: observe, model, infer, act, do not fall over.

Contact:

Email:
LinkedIn: john-ross-stowers

In my spare time I am usually doing house renovations, messing about with race cars, or trying to recover from crossfit and padel.

I used to do a lot of open source work. In the intervening years I have mostly been paid to do things that are not open source. It happens.