Will Johnson
Software Engineer • AI & Systems • IBM Research
About Me
I’m a Software Engineer focused on foundation model training, ML systems, and high-performance pipelines. I work at IBM Research on their AI Platform Engineering team where I build model tuning infrastructure, design lightweight transformer variants for accelerated testing, and lately have been developing CI/CD pipelines for AI hardware systems. I am also developing a game with my friends in my free time.
Projects
IBM Research Foundation Model Tuning Stack
View →Maintainer and core contributor for IBM’s open-source tuning stack used across IBM Research and Red Hat OpenShift AI. Expanded automated E2E testing, streamlined data preprocessing pipelines, and led stable release workflows.
Lightweight Transformer Model Variants
View →Trained and evaluated four compact transformer models using TorchTitan to accelerate nightly testing on IBM's AIU hardware accelerator. Reduced evaluation time by up to 90%. Released one model publicly with 100,000+ downloads.
Hermitage Games
View →Co-founded an indie game company designing a 2D platformer in Godot. Lead gameplay architecture, animation tooling, and system integration across a 10+ person creative/engineering team.