Data foundations and AI systems that hold up in production.
Houghton Labs is the independent practice of John Houghton, a senior data engineer with a decade of work at Meta, Apple, Kaiser Permanente and Intuit. I design pipelines, analytics and AI systems — including private, on-prem AI that keeps your data in your building.
What I help with
Data engineering
Modern pipelines and warehouses: ingestion, dbt modeling, orchestration, testing and CI — built to be owned by your team.
dbtDagsterDuckDBSQLAI engineering
LLM features, agents and evaluation harnesses wired into real workflows, with dataset curation and guardrails from day one.
LLMsagentsevalsLocal & private AI
On-device speech, vision and language models on Apple Silicon or your own hardware — no data leaves the premises.
on-premSTT/TTSvisionAnalytics & decision support
Metrics, experiments and dashboards grounded in economics — so the numbers answer the questions leadership actually asks.
metricsexperimentationSmall, senior, hands-on
Assess
A short, fixed-scope review of your data and goals, ending in a written plan with clear priorities.
Build
I work in your repos and tools, shipping in small increments with tests and documentation.
Hand off
Runbooks, walkthroughs and a team that can extend the system without me.
Recent builds
SD Open Data Pipeline
San Diego civic data with Dagster, dbt and DuckDB spatial joins, fully tested in CI.
GitHub →Local AI Showcase
Private cameras and voice agents running entirely on a Mac Studio M3 Ultra.
Details →Finance Wizard
An agent-first personal finance app on a DuckDB/dbt lakehouse with interactive models.
Details →TODO
Hi, I'm John.
I've spent my career turning messy data into dependable systems — most recently supporting FAIR and Reality Labs at Meta, and before that Apple Maps, Kaiser Permanente and Intuit. I trained as an economist, so I care about the decision the data serves, not just the pipeline.
Have a data or AI problem worth solving?
Send a few lines about what you're working on. I reply within one business day.