John Shepard
Principal at Shepard Labs
Greater Sacramento United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJohn Shepard is a Principal engineer and serial founder with a decade of hands-on experience building robotics, mechatronics, and AI/ML systems for space, agriculture, and industrial customers. He has led end-to-end development of high-performance dynamics and control systems—from a kW-class inertial load test rig for hypersonic actuators to a telescope rotator with 30 μdeg RMS accuracy—and scaled autonomous robot fleets inspecting GW-scale solar assets. A PhD-trained systems thinker, he blends instrumentation, electro-mechanical design, computer vision, and reinforcement learning to deliver productionized edge AI and patented hardware, and his startups have progressed from NASA SBIR awards to strategic acquisition. Based in Greater Sacramento, he pairs rigorous academic pedigree with repeatable startup execution and an appreciation for pragmatic, model-based engineering approaches that thrive in extreme environments.
10 years of coding experience
20 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Mechanical Engineering, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Mechanical Engineering at Santa Clara University
Github Skills (4)
nodejs7
typescript5
css5
javascript1
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
elexfreeman/likeckocko_landing
Jul 2019 - Sep 2020
Contributions:4 PRs, 85 pushes, 6 branches in 1 year 2 months
elexfreeman/lavacacao
May 2023 - Mar 2025
Contributions:17 PRs, 45 pushes, 4 branches in 1 year 10 months
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