John Click

PLATFORM ENGINEERING | AI SYSTEMS | PUBLIC SERVICE

PHOTOGRAPHY | SRE & DEVOPS | LEADERSHIP

I build infrastructure that empowers teams and ship systems that scale.

Diverse teams with unique backgrounds drive social change & progress.

Cloud
Ideas
Code

Projects

Personal & Professional

Check this space for current personal and work projects I'm working on.

Work Samples

Showcased Work Products

Selection demonstrating my history of work across various technology, political, and non-profit sectors.

Design Portfolio

Highlighted Designs

Selection of visual asset designs I've created

Photography Portfolio

Select Samples

A small preview of my photography portfolio

Experience

My diverse interests often take me to the places, the technology, the teams and organizations where I believe my efforts will have the most significant impact.

Click any role to expand details.

EMPLOYER	ROLE	DATES
RIVIAN & VW GROUP TECHNOLOGIES	Senior IT Solutions Engineer Digital Workplace, AI Enablement & Platform Engineering	October 2025 – Present
Own end-to-end strategy, administration, and governance for the Digital Workplace application suite, aligning with business objectives and security standards. Architect and implement complex, scalable integrations between collaboration platforms and key business systems like HRIS and Identity Management. Design and build sophisticated automation workflows to streamline business processes and improve operational efficiency across the organization. Serve as Tier 3 subject matter expert for the Digital Workplace ecosystem, performing root cause analysis and implementing long-term solutions.
RIVIAN	Cloud Engineer Google Workspace & Cloud Platform Admin	December 2024 – October 2025
Supported Rivian & VW Tech Joint Venture’s IT AI @Work initiatives, developing seamless integrations for Google Workspace’s AI tools, platforms, apps, & integrations. Built robust 215+ source NotebookLM for RAG-centric internal prompt engineering & strategy. Created multi-step Agentic flywheel systems in VSCode (with MCP connectors), Glean, & Google Workspace. Key contributor toward Rivian’s 6-month transition from Microsoft Suite to Google Workspace, identifying gaps, providing user-support documentation, and deploying rapid fixes.
THE WHITE HOUSE & BIDEN\|HARRIS CAMPAIGNS	Advance Lead Presidential & VP Event Operations	June 2021 – January 2025
Led teams of 40+ Advance Associates for VP Harris’s visit to Philadelphia to announce her choice of running mate for 2024. Led 2-day Savannah, GA bus tour with multiple high-stakes events. Briefed President Biden upon arrival to tour storm damage in Capitola, CA. Served as liaison between local business owners, U.S. Secret Service, local political leadership, and White House staff. Served as Site Lead for VP Harris’s confidential debate preparations in Pittsburgh, PA, and numerous Air Force One and HMX-1 airport arrivals.
U.S. DIGITAL RESPONSE	Volunteer Elections Program Lead Alpine, MI Township	December 2023 – February 2024
Partnered with state & municipal officials to design bespoke software & platform solutions within the USDR Elections Program toolkit. Experimented with novel platforms and integrations for the Elections Program core technology stack (Airtable, SendGrid).
PROJECT N95	Chief of Staff & Operations Lead DevOps, People Ops & Strategic Leadership	April 2020 – January 2024
Led strategic initiatives supporting the COVID-19 pandemic response, facilitating over 5 million units of verified PPE to medical facilities. Grew organization from 30 rapid-response volunteers to 400+ employees and alumni. Built custom applicant tracking system in Airtable with multi-round interview process screening 2,000+ applications. Led DevOps and system engineering for entire technology stack, including headless React/Shopify storefront, CI/CD pipelines, and NIST 800-171 certification. Developed and executed seven-figure contract management of organizational partnership with WhenToTest.org & Arizona State University, funded by NIH NIBIB RADx Initiative grant.
STANFORD UNIVERSITY Office for Religious Life	Operations Coordinator Stanford Memorial Church & CIRCLE	March 2018 – January 2021
Served as building manager for Stanford Memorial Church & floor manager for the Center for Inter-Religious Community, Learning & Experiences (CIRCLE). Managed property operations, maintenance, financial transactions, cash handling, and Gift Transmittals processes.
GOOGLE Data Center Delivery & Engineering	Administrative Business Partner Technical Infrastructure	January 2017 – October 2017
Provided direct executive support to 1 VP & up to 3 Directors with over 1,800 indirect reports, from the Global Google Data Center construction leadership team. Coordinated logistics for multiple global team summits in Singapore & Sunnyvale, CA. Managed over 5,000 independent calendar appointments. Given permission to access one of Google’s most preeminent proprietary, secure Data Center locations in Singapore.
THE WHITE HOUSE Obama Administration	Switchboard Operator & Advance Associate Office of Management & Administration / Scheduling & Advance	October 2009 – January 2017
Personally staffed President Obama and routed calls to/from foreign Heads of State, Cabinet Secretaries, Members of Congress, and the First Family during unfolding crises. Supported logistics for 15+ Presidential trips. Personally briefed President Obama on arrival at Forsyth Technical Community College, NC. Supervised 2016 WH Easter Egg Roll entrance staff team of 80+, responsible for entry of over 35,000 guests. Led teams for 6 State Arrivals (11,000+ guests) and 5 Easter Egg Rolls. Earned White House Personnel Security Office Clearance: Adjudicated to Top Secret-level, granted Secret.
OBAMA FOR AMERICA Primary & General Election	Field Organizer	November 2007 – November 2008
Led Field Operations in bellwether Bucks County, Pennsylvania, with Obama/Biden winning 18,534 votes (51.28%), nearly 8 percentage points greater than Kerry/Edwards in 2004. Mobilized hundreds of volunteers across multiple states (PA, SD, KY, IN, OH, NH) for voter contact and persuasion efforts during primaries and general election.
Resume	LinkedIn	About

Featured Work

Selected projects and initiatives that demonstrate impact across AI systems, cloud infrastructure, and technical leadership.

AI Systems & Strategy

Context Engineering at Rivian — Google Talk	Org-wide presentation on transitioning from ad-hoc prompting to persistent intelligence using Gemini Gems and RAG patterns.
DevOps/IaC Nexus Architecture	Multi-agent orchestration system treating AI context as Infrastructure as Code. ADR-first development protocol with immutable handoff patterns.
Gemini Gems Suite	10+ specialized AI personas (CRAFT, Meta-Prompt Engineer, Discernment Partner) shared org-wide with full cookbook documentation.
Context Engineering Confluence KB	102 articles, 2,855 views, 37.3% org reach. Foundational documentation defining Context Engineering as a discipline at Rivian.

Infrastructure & DevOps

CI/CD Pipeline Template	Enterprise-grade GitLab CI/CD template with Policy-as-Code validation, SAST integration, DLP sanitization, and WIF secrets architecture.
Blameless Postmortem — Directory Sync	SRE-practice postmortem identifying systemic failures in legacy VM infrastructure, leading to serverless AWS Lambda remediation.
Google Workspace Migration	Key contributor to Rivian & VW Tech joint venture’s 6-month transition from Microsoft Suite to Google Workspace across the organization.

Automation, Applications & Leadership

Prompt Library Marketplace	Apps Script app deployed to internal Google Workspace Marketplace for structured prompt sharing across the enterprise.
Airtable Health Equity Platform	Dynamic candidate management system at Project N95 leveraging Airtable for equitable hiring, automated screening, and real-time dashboards.
Project N95 DevOps Leadership	Led 6+ volunteer engineers through roadmapping, agile scrum, platform engineering, and rapid-response fixes during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Presidential Advance Operations	Multi-agency logistics coordination for presidential events. Briefed President Biden. Liaison between Secret Service, local officials, and White House staff.
White House Switchboard Operations	8 years routing calls between the general public, Members of Congress, White House staff, the President and the First Family.
Three-Domain Web Platform	Building JohnClicks.com, JohnClick.dev, and JohnClick.ai — three sites sharing a single Notion CMS backend with planned Gatsby/React migration.

Skills & Areas of Focus

I bring a diverse toolkit across cloud infrastructure, AI engineering, public service, and creative work. Here are my core areas.

Platform & Cloud Engineering

Digital Workplace strategy, enterprise Google Workspace administration, cloud platform operations, and infrastructure management at scale.
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Google Workspace | GCP | AWS
Docker | Kubernetes | BigQuery
Apps Script | Terraform | IAM
GitLab | ServiceNow | Monitoring
									
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AI, Context & Prompt Engineering

Building agentic AI workflows with frontier LLMs, MCP servers, and IDE-integrated agents. 40-60% dev velocity improvement, 85-95% AI task success rate.


Claude Opus 4.6 | Gemini 3.1 | GPT-5.4
Claude Code | Gemini CLI | Cursor
Windsurf | Antigravity | Zed
MCP | A2A | LangGraph | Vertex AI
Context Engineering | RAG | NotebookLM

SRE & DevOps

Site reliability engineering, blameless postmortems, CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure automation.


GitHub Actions | GitLab CI/CD
SRE | Blameless Postmortems
Infrastructure as Code
Monitoring | Observability

Web Engineering

Full-stack development from React frontends to Node.js backends, with headless CMS and 3D web experience.


React | Next.js | Gatsby
GraphQL | TypeScript | Python
Tailwind | Three.js | Node.js
Netlify | Shopify | Notion API

Strategic Leadership

Program management, stakeholder coordination, and operational leadership across government, tech, and nonprofit sectors.
Event & Advance Operations

Presidential-level event logistics, Secret Service coordination, and high-stakes operational planning across 3 administrations.
Systems & Security

Network administration, security operations, and enterprise system design for organizations of all sizes.
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Security | Risk Management
Automation | Scalability
Network Admin | IAM
Redundancy | Performance
									
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Photography

Documentary and landscape photography across national parks, the White House, and Silicon Valley. Each frame tells a story of place and purpose.

Writing

Technical articles on prompt engineering, AI systems, and context engineering.
Subscribe on Substack for new posts.

Zero-Shot Prompting

How modern LLMs leverage instruction tuning to follow commands without in-context examples. Covers direct zero-shot, Zero-Shot CoT, and optimization strategies like role anchoring and negative constraints.
- Read Article
Prompt Engineering

A comprehensive guide to structured prompting as a discipline. Covers what prompt engineering actually is, the stochastic reality of LLMs, and why "predicting the next word" understates what these systems do.
- Read on Substack
Meta-Prompting & Recursive Optimization

When prompts become code. The Conductor-Expert pattern, the Adversarial Trinity (Generator/Auditor/Optimizer), and recursive self-improvement loops that achieve 100% accuracy on the Game of 24 benchmark.
- Read Article

Get in touch

Reach out to me to partner, collaborate, or just to say hullo!

John Clicks

Senior IT Solutions Engineer

Cloud Engineer

THE WHITE HOUSE & BIDEN|HARRIS CAMPAIGNS

Advance Lead

Volunteer Elections Program Lead

Chief of Staff & Operations Lead

STANFORD UNIVERSITY

Operations Coordinator

Administrative Business Partner

THE WHITE HOUSE

Switchboard Operator & Advance Associate

OBAMA FOR AMERICA

Field Organizer

AI Systems & Strategy

Infrastructure & DevOps

Automation, Applications & Leadership

Platform & Cloud Engineering

AI, Context & Prompt Engineering

SRE & DevOps

Web Engineering

Strategic Leadership

Event & Advance Operations

Systems & Security

Photography