John Pearson, Ph.D.

John Pearson is a senior software engineer at Nexus Labs, where he serves as the primary engineer for Maverick Protocol, a DeFi automated market maker that reached 80,000 peak daily active users, ~3 million total users, and over $70 billion in cumulative trading volume across 6 chains. Over 4 years he grew from team contributor to sole owner of the V2 stack (98% of API, 73% of frontend), shipping 121 production releases across 12 repositories and building 3 additional DeFi products from scratch. His CTO called him "the kind of engineer you build a company around."

The path from classroom to codebase started with a specific problem. In 2015, while teaching AP Physics at Pace Academy, John founded Illuminotes LLC and built an interactive EdTech platform using React, Redux, and Firebase with KaTeX for LaTeX math rendering. The platform served his own physics courses and grew into a Udemy course with 250+ enrolled students. Illuminotes was not a side project. It was the moment a teacher became an engineer: he saw a broken workflow in his own classroom and built the software to fix it.

That same builder instinct now extends to engineering itself. John built a Claude Code agent swarm of 100+ specialized subagents, coordinated through a deterministic harness of hooks, types, and linters that constrains probabilistic AI into reliable output. The system routinely compresses multi-week engineering efforts into single days. The core framework is open source at Web3-Claude, and he has published a HackerNoon series on the patterns that survived scaling to 100+ agents.

Before engineering, John spent 15 years as Science Department Chair at Pace Academy in Atlanta, managing 10 faculty members while teaching AP and Honors mathematics, physics, and computer science at every grade level. He built a multi-year statistical analysis in R of ~3 million data points across 100,000+ student records, with interactive Shiny dashboards presented to administration for equity decisions. He received 5 teaching fellowships during his tenure.

Outside of software, John has coached rowing for over 20 years. He currently serves as Head Masters Women's Coach at the Atlanta Rowing Club, where his team finished 1st nationally in the Masters Club Category in 2025 and has earned 15+ National Championship medals since 2021. He holds a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Georgia Tech, where his thesis on the noncommutative geometry of ultrametric Cantor sets won the Best Thesis Award, and a B.A. in Mathematics from Dartmouth College. His research has been published in the American Mathematical Monthly and the Journal of Noncommutative Geometry.