Julian Herwitz

Head of Engineering, Public Sector @ TwelveLabs

Washington DC-Baltimore Area

About

Hands-on technical leader with 15+ years building products across multimodal AI, cloud infrastructure, cybersecurity, and energy domains. Founded and scaled a vertical SaaS company from zero to acquisition. Previously built core services enabling hyperscale at AWS and NSA-grade security at Virtru. Always curious.

Experience

  • Head of Engineering, Public Sector at TwelveLabs
    Feb 2026 - Present · 6 mos

  • Co-Founder & CTO [Acquired] at Porosity
    Jan 2023 - Nov 2025 · 2 yrs 11 mos

    Got boots on the ground at remote wellsites nationwide to discover and close critical gaps in LDAR and field operations of upstream oil & gas. Led all technical aspects from product vision to deployment and support. * Acquired by Energy Overwatch, an established industry leader servicing Fortune 500 energy companies. * Hired and led a team of 4 world-class engineers who shipped 1,000+ customer-requested capabilities. * Grew from zero to six-figure ARR with zero churned customers. * Built multimodal AI data platform processing thermal videos, satellite imagery, drone footage, and SCADA telemetry, enabling hundreds of operators to safely perform mission-critical field work daily. * Contributed to all aspects of the organization, including board-level strategy, finance, sales, hands-on development, and customer support.

  • Senior Software Engineer at Amazon Web Services (AWS)
    Sep 2020 - Jan 2023 · 2 yrs 5 mos

    [Amazon S3] * Led the design and implementation of an efficient telemetry data pipeline, including host-level pre-aggregation, Spark-based stream processing, and a federated data store queryable with Athena. * Led the delivery of ACL-based authorization metrics, including feasibility analysis, architecture, validation, & code review. * Drove reintroduction of foundational test capabilities like isolated dev pipelines and reproducible load tests, guiding multiple teams to successful launches of major feature and performance improvements. * Regularly work with top Fortune 500 customers to address technical questions, give recommendations on best practices, and collect product requirements. Includes addressing urgent asks like unblocking high-profile feature launches and investigating unexpected behavior using time-series analysis over multi-PB datasets. * Design, development, and operational experience for one of the world’s most heavily used web services.

  • Staff Engineer at Virtru
    Jun 2018 - Aug 2020 · 2 yrs 3 mos

    * Led the design and implementation of a transparent data security sidecar for Kubernetes. * Led the design and implementation of a privacy-preserving contact tracer using S3, Spark, and GeoMesa. * Worked with a small team to launch a data encryption SDK at Black Hat 2019. Included critical work on architecture, security, developer documentation, and CI testing/deployment. * Led the design and implementation of a SaaS email DLP gateway using Netty, DynamoDB, postfix, and SQS.

  • Amazon Web Services ()
    • Software Development Engineer
      Jan 2016 - Jun 2018 · 2 yrs 6 mos

      [AWS Lambda] * Lead developer of “Safe Function Updates”, a major internal utilization feature which dynamically repacks compute capacity by replacing unreachable or underutilized containers. The feature launched in Q1 2017 and recycled dozens of PB of worker memory as of Q1 2018 * Wrote a simulator that runs the entire Lambda stack in a single VM, to optimize host utilization via grid search. * Added an automated safety net to conserve compute capacity during LSEs and capacity drains. * Worked with a small team to deliver function-level concurrency throttling using a new microservice. * Design, development, and operational experience for a service that handled hundreds of thousands of tps and managed lifecycle, placement, and utilization for nearly a million ec2 instances worldwide.

    • Software Development Engineer
      May 2015 - Jan 2016 · 9 mos

      [AWS IoT] * Worked with a small team to deliver IoT device auth control and data planes for re:invent GA launch. * Designed and implemented core data models and APIs for cert management and auth. * Collaborated with customers to formulate an API for device certificate distribution, which is integrated into customer manufacturing lines.