William Lyon
Senior Product Manager, AI Innovation
San Francisco Bay Area United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolWilliam Lyon is a Senior Product Manager focused on AI innovation with 13 years of experience building model-native applications and graph-first developer tools from the Bay Area. He has deep hands-on engineering roots at Neo4j—contributing to well-known projects like neo4j-graphql-js and GRANDstack starter—paired with product leadership roles that bridge developer experience, serverless functions, and agent-driven APIs. William’s background spans developer relations, Labs experimentation, and authoring a full-stack GraphQL book, giving him a unique ability to validate prototypes and ship production integrations. He’s comfortable across the stack—API design, data import/visualization, and temporal/authorization handling in graph queries—while also creating tutorials and community programs that accelerate adoption. Notably, he blends academic rigor (M.S. in Computer Science) with practical finance and geospatial experience, having extended Cypher for geospatial queries during a GSoC project. This combination of product strategy, open-source contributions, and developer empathy positions him to turn graph and AI research into usable developer platforms.
13 years of coding experience
18 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science (M.S.) Computer Science, Master of Science (M.S.) Computer Science at University of MontanaFinancial Engineering coursework, Financial Engineering coursework at Illinois Institute of TechnologyBS Business Administration: Financial Management, BS Business Administration: Financial Management at The University of Montana - College of Business
Stackoverflow
8,516reputation
340kreached
317answers
0questions
csv
top-5%
cypher
top-5%
neo4j
top-1%
Github Skills (25)
apim10
javascript10
back-end-development10
api-design10
graph-database10
wpgraphql10
mongodb-database10
neo4j10
api10
cypher10
wordpress-graphql10
graphql10
mongodb10
react10
documentation10
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
grand-stack/grand-stack-starter
Jul 2018 - Apr 2021
Simple starter project for GRANDstack full stack apps
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:25 releases, 120 commits, 32 PRs in 2 years 9 months
Contributions summary:William primarily contributed to the UI of a GRANDstack application, focusing on the `UserList` component. They implemented features such as rounding numbers to two decimal places, incorporating an "orderBy" argument for table sorting, and adding error handling to manage potential null values. Furthermore, they made updates related to the Neo4j GraphQL library and performed merges, indicating their involvement in maintaining the codebase and integrating changes.
reactfull-stackdockernodejsgraphql
neo4j-graphql/neo4j-graphql-js
Oct 2017 - May 2021
NOTE: This project is no longer actively maintained. Please consider using the official Neo4j GraphQL Library (linked in README).
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:3 reviews, 522 commits, 124 PRs in 3 years 8 months
Contributions summary:William contributed to the development of the neo4j-graphql-js library, focusing on backend functionalities. They made changes to improve the efficiency of driver instances, and updated Cypher queries and handled custom query names. Further contributions involved implementing features related to handling temporal types, authorization, and implementing node filtering logic.
actively-maintainedgraphql-libraryneo4jneo4j-graphqlgraphql
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