Jason has built search and recommendation systems for the past 6 years. He has consulted and advised a dozens startups in the last year to improve their RAG systems. He is the creator of the Instructor Python library.

Skylar Payne specializes in rescuing AI systems that work in demos but fail in production. As founder of Wicked Data LLC, he diagnoses and fixes broken retrieval systems for startups and enterprises alike. Previously, as VP of Engineering & Data Science at HealthRhythms, he built monitoring systems that caught silent ML failures before they reached users. At LinkedIn, he led teams that increased experimentation velocity 3x while moving core metrics by double digits through improved recommendation systems. At Google, he developed testing infrastructure for large-scale distributed systems. Skylar has personally debugged retrieval systems across every scale—from early prototypes to platforms serving hundreds of millions—and brings battle-tested patterns that bridge the gap between ML experiments and reliable products.