Jon Torrez

Architect, guitarist, traveler. Measurements over opinions.

About

Jon Torrez is a technologist from West Texas who has spent his career building the infrastructure other people never see. At McAfee he built and ran the global cloud behind McAfee Global Threat Intelligence, a real-time service answering billions of queries a day. He is a named co-inventor on two U.S. patents in network traffic prioritization.

Across McAfee (an Intel company), Cisco and the clients he has advised since, he has argued for the same two things: architecture over the next point product, and a measurement over an opinion. That conviction is why he co-founded Subnet345. When he began running teams of AI agents, he found he had no independent way to know what they had actually done. Plexus is the answer he built: a record of each agent's instrumented actions, kept inside the customer's own environment, attributed and tamper-evident.

Beyond work

Jon was born and raised in Texas and grew up in Abernathy, outside Lubbock, where the hacker collective Cult of the Dead Cow began (806 represent). He built his early career and professional life in Atlanta, and today lives in Illinois.

He was born with albinism, and with the low vision that leaves him legally blind. He has traveled to over 80 places across 19 countries and four continents.

He is a guitarist who has studied under world-class players, among them Mike Martin, Christopher Parkening, Barry Richman, and George Price.

How he works

Colleagues and clients describe the same qualities across more than a decade. He questions the problem before solving it, and challenges architectural norms when they stop serving the business. He explains complex systems so that anyone can follow them, and he shares what he knows instead of keeping it. Client or not, he works as part of the team he is serving. And he would rather see a measurement than hear an opinion.

“A member of my senior staff, Jon designed, led the implementation and operation of McAfee's critical customer-facing infrastructure serving billions of queries daily from virtually all McAfee products world-wide. Jon is the ultimate problem-solver with great technical acumen and a can-do attitude that he applies daily to solve critical business problems”
Dmitri Alperovitch, managed Jon directly, August 2011
“Jon is a unique IT executive possessing staggering technical knowledge coupled with the ability to both challenge architectural norms and deliver real business value.”
Stephen Brodigan, senior to Jon, May 2010
“He is a true master in networking and has an innate ability to explain things to individuals of all experience levels and that is pretty uncommon, specifically in more robust, complex infrastructure environments.”
Kevin Carleo, client, October 2020
“What I appreciate most is how he really makes you feel that he is a part of your team despite the fact that we have contracted out professional services to the organization he belongs to.”
Victor Chu, client, August 2020
“There are many great engineers, but few that have the ability that Jon has to not only design the solution, but describe it and clearly document it for others.”
Philip Palmer, senior to Jon, April 2010

Read his recommendations on LinkedIn

Strengths

Career

Patents

Co-inventor on two U.S. patents:

Selected projects

Writing

Technologies

AI/ML & Inference
vLLM, OpenAI-compatible APIs, Qwen, LoRA, QLoRA, SFT dataset curation, inference routing, agent decision loops, RAG, CAG
Languages & Frameworks
Go, Python, TypeScript, C, Node.js, React Native, Expo
Infrastructure & Platforms
NVIDIA A & H-series GPUs, Linux, Podman, systemd, WireGuard, VMware, Cisco ACI, UCS, F5, Palo Alto, EMC, Pure Storage
Data, Messaging & State
CockroachDB, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Redis, NATS, MinIO, OpenSearch
Observability & Operations
OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, Jaeger, CI/CD, Terraform, Ansible
Cloud
AWS, Azure, GCP
Architecture & Governance
TOGAF, DoDAF, Zachman, GDPR, HIPAA, SOC 2

Education

Contact and profiles

gmail@jontorrez.com