Johnny Goodnow
Engineering leader with 10+ years scaling engineering organizations (including managing managers) across enterprise SaaS, AI/ML platforms, and data security. Started as Tonic AI’s first engineer and grew into director of a ~50-person org, with a track record partnering with sales and customer success on enterprise deals (Walmart, Sony Music, and Amazon at Airtable; eBay, Flexport, and BetterHelp at Tonic AI) and building the compliance-critical infrastructure (SOC2/HIPAA audit support, RBAC and permissions systems) those customers require. Currently leading Airtable’s Agent Platform team, scaling agent/MCP adoption 13–57x in under a year.
Industry Experience
Engineering Manager @ Airtable (San Francisco, CA)
October 2025 – Present · airtable.com
- Lead the Agent Platform team (10–14 engineers), which owns Airtable’s MCP Server, extending what first-party and third-party agents can do within Airtable, and driving ecosystem efforts across third-party distribution (plugins, connectors, apps), an MCP CLI, agent documentation, and integration with frontier agents.
- Since founding the team in January, grew DAU 57x (160 → 9.2K), MAU 13x (3.2K → 41K), and daily MCP calls 13x (15K → 200K, since March).
- Run the Agent-First Automations team, building a best-in-class experience for constructing and running agent-driven workflows.
- Own permissions for Agents and lead the refactor of Airtable’s permissions model for Interfaces.
- Partnered on custom enterprise integrations that were critical to closing Airtable’s largest enterprise deal to date, with Walmart, and collaborated directly with Sony Music and Amazon.
- Previously owned Airtable’s Sync feature, third-party data integrations, HyperDB, and other features across Airtable’s product surface.
Sabbatical
May 2024 – October 2025
- Took a year and a half off to pursue art and music professionally, get married, relocate from Oregon to California, and set up our lives for our first kid (born December 2025).
Director of Engineering @ Tonic AI (San Francisco, CA)
May 2023 – May 2024 · tonic.ai
- Ran an engineering org of ~50 (4 engineering managers and 4 staff engineers as direct reports, reporting to the CTO), owning strategy (milestones, quarterly goals, OKRs), staffing, cross-functional projects, data engineering, and engineering leadership development across all of Tonic’s products.
- Led team staffing and multiple re-orgs to align with the company’s long-term goals, and drove company-wide process and tooling migrations.
- Contributed to SOC2 and HIPAA audit readiness, including logging/redaction fixes required for compliance audits.
- Collaborated directly with enterprise customers including eBay, Flexport, and BetterHelp on integrations and consultations.
Engineering Manager @ Tonic AI (San Francisco, CA)
October 2021 – May 2023 · tonic.ai
- Managed the Workflows team, Tonic’s primary product-facing team, focused on getting users immediate and recurring value from the product, and the De-identification team, responsible for protecting data via synthesis and masking across a wide variety of data types with quality and privacy guarantees (15 engineers total across both teams).
- Owned RBAC and configuration inheritance/branching for Tonic Structural, and extended Tonic’s format-preserving encryption for unique identifiers.
- Set the engineering roadmap and collaborated with product and design on team goals, shipping some of Tonic Structural’s most ambitious features, including workspace inheritance/templating and a ground-up rebuild of Privacy Hub.
Founding Engineer, Engineering Manager @ Tonic AI (San Francisco, CA)
November 2019 – October 2021 · tonic.ai
- Joined as a founding engineer and grew into managing a team of 8.
- Co-invented Tonic’s patented multi-database subsetting approach for generating relationship-aware traversal plans across source tables.
- Implemented production systems for GAN-based and other generative synthetic-data techniques, predating today’s LLM-based approaches, turning data science specs into production code to generate and upscale synthetic data.
Director of Developer Relations @ Stellar Development Foundation (San Francisco, CA)
August 2018 – August 2019 · stellar.org
- Led the growth of Stellar’s developer ecosystem, driving open source advocacy and building its technical community both online and offline.
Software Developer, Developer Relations Advocate @ Asana (San Francisco, CA)
January 2016 – June 2018 · asana.com
- Built internal tools and infrastructure integrating Salesforce, Recurly (billing), Zendesk/Desk.com (support), and Asana itself, spanning Sales, Customer Success, User Operations, Marketing, and Finance.
- Assembled Python ETL pipelines connecting those systems and enrichment sources like Clearbit, and delivered custom reporting and analysis tooling supporting company-wide initiatives.
- Shipped documentation and client libraries in 5 languages covering Asana’s entire public API, prioritized platform enhancements and bug fixes, and supported developers building on the API.
Forward Deployed Engineer and Software Engineer @ Palantir Technologies (Palo Alto, CA)
October 2011 – January 2016 · palantir.com
- Partnered directly with nonprofits and NGOs (including World Wildlife Fund, Team Rubicon, and the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children) on problem sets including disaster relief, illicit networks, and homelessness.
- Delivered extensive customer-facing work (sales calls, consultations, and custom integrations) for large financial institutions including Citi, Chase, Wells Fargo, Thomson Reuters, and Bloomberg, using Palantir’s analytical capabilities.
- Developed data integrations spanning Palantir’s and open source software in Java and Python.
- Served as developer support engineer and developer support team lead, managing an 8-person team within Palantir’s ~30-person worldwide support org.
Skills & Expertise
Leadership: Engineering management at scale (teams of 8–50+, including managing managers), org design & re-orgs, hiring & recruiting strategy, cross-functional roadmap ownership, incident response.
Enterprise & Compliance: Enterprise customer partnership (sales & customer success collaboration, custom integrations), SOC2/HIPAA audit support, RBAC & permissions systems, billing system integration, data security & de-identification.
Technical: Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, Java, C#, AWS, distributed systems, data-intensive applications, AI/ML platforms & agent infrastructure (MCP).
Education
Computer Science, B.S. — Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA