I build stuff that builds stuff.

— Jonny Asmar, Staff / Principal Software Engineer

Ask anything about his work. Answers land here, and the receipts open alongside.

Answers come from an agent grounded in Jonny’s actual history. It will tell you when it doesn’t know.

Expertise

Product & program

A lot of this work is product work. Finding the real problem, choosing what not to build, and then running the program that gets it adopted — usually without a PM or a TPM in the room.

Problem definition: Reframed Meta's privacy review from a bespoke-per-review problem into a template problem — consolidating hundreds of thousands of mitigations into ~10,000 reusable primitives. The cycle time fell from 55 days to under 5 because the model changed, not because the code got faster.
Driving adoption: Built @trello/aidev solo, alongside regular delivery, then got the Platform team to adopt it and make it the foundation of Atlassian's AI SDLC workstream. Championed and led company-wide GraphQL adoption at Cvent, reshaping frontend API strategy.
Measuring the thing: Designed the analytics suite tracking 80+ operational metrics for reuse and accuracy at Meta, and automated evidence collection so 65% of requirements verify programmatically. He instruments what he ships and argues from the numbers.
Cross-functional delivery: Technical lead on a compliance system gating ~30,000 product areas, operating with Product, Design, Privacy, and Legal against tight deadlines. Led the full visual refresh of Trello's Planner end to end. The privacy-review overhaul had visibility up to Zuckerberg.
End-to-end ownership: atrium is the clean example: he set the roadmap, designed it, wrote the Rust and the React, wrote the docs, ran the releases, and supported the users — and those users now want to pay for it.
Multiplying other people: Mentored 13 engineers across two scrum teams at Cvent and founded re:Render, an internal UI education initiative. Ran biweekly knowledge-sharing sessions for 30+ engineers at Meta. The team grew from 10 to 80 engineers around this work.

How he works

Principles that show up in the work, each attached to something that actually happened.

Resistance is signal.: When review owners wouldn't trust a wholesale AI migration at Meta, the compromise — AI-assisted, human-validated — moved 85% of ~30,000 requirements onto templates in two months. The pushback produced the version people trusted.
Throw data at it before people.: His first observability pitch was rejected. Workshops where stakeholders co-designed the tool got it approved, and its data unlocked the 200-template system.
Make it cool to drive adoption.: The design system earned its place on the consumer paved road through 0→100% test coverage, accessibility checks in CI, and docs 10+ teams picked up overnight — not through a mandate.
Let the team be the hero.: He built the first proofs-of-concept, then handed ownership to junior champions; his mentees became subject-matter experts and earned five promotions in a year.
Boundaries first, bridges second.: Merged teams stop feuding when responsibilities are clear; then you build the channels that connect them.
Keep good ideas in your back pocket.: Ship the good-enough version, collect the evidence, win the argument when the data is in hand.
Failure is a pilot program.: His first Meta project was scrapped after months of work; the one reusable insight in the wreckage became the architecture that took reviews from 55 days to under 5.

AI-native engineering

Agent tooling and orchestrationMCPAI-assisted development

Product architecture

TypeScriptReactNext.jsNode.jsRust/TauriGraphQLsystems design

Technical leadership

Staff-level ICproduct deliverycross-functional leadershipmentorship