# Jay Zeng

> Jay Zeng's evidence-led portfolio and writing on engineering leadership, applied AI, agent infrastructure, platform engineering, and company building.

Jay is a Seattle-based engineering executive, founder, and hands-on builder. He currently leads an 80-engineer organization at CVS Health and previously held leadership roles across Lowe’s Innovation Labs, Supply Chain, and Core AI after co-founding Knock as CTO. The portfolio distinguishes Jay's direct work, team outcomes, public corroboration, and later company results.

Preferred contact: jayzeng@jayzeng.com

## Core pages

- [Portfolio](https://jayzeng.com/): Career overview, selected work, operating principles, side projects, and contact information.
- [Writing](https://jayzeng.com/writing/): Editorial index covering applied AI, agent infrastructure, platform engineering, and AI-native organizations.

## Essays

- [The semantic layer agents are missing](https://jayzeng.com/writing/semantic-layer-agents/): Why agent-ready software must expose meaning, intent, policy, side effects, and recovery—not only API endpoints.
- [Memory is infrastructure, not a prompt trick](https://jayzeng.com/writing/memory-is-infrastructure/): A practical view of memory as capture, retrieval, context budgeting, correction, and recovery.
- [What AI-native engineering actually changes](https://jayzeng.com/writing/ai-native-engineering/): How AI changes the way engineering organizations express intent, define quality, constrain risk, and assign ownership.

## Selected external work

- [pi-memory](https://github.com/jayzeng/pi-memory): Plain-text memory for the Pi coding agent with optional semantic and hybrid retrieval. It ranked #27 of 5,437 packages in [Pi's download-sorted catalog](https://pi.dev/packages) on August 10, 2026.
- [agentmemory](https://github.com/jayzeng/agentmemory): Portable, inspectable memory for coding agents including Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor.
- [PaperPilot](https://www.paperpilot.me/): Privacy-first product family Jay designed and built across native apps, web products, APIs, encryption, storage, OCR, AI integration, packaging, deployment, and operations.
- [PaperPilot Transfer](https://transfer.paperpilot.me/): End-to-end encrypted file sharing with password protection, expiration dates, and view limits.
- [PaperPilot Playground](https://transfer.paperpilot.me/playground): Browser workspace for previewing and preparing files before sharing.
- [VibeLogger](https://vibelogger.paperpilot.me/): Local-first macOS work-session recorder with on-device transcription, structured extraction, search, and optional AI analysis. The same native product line includes VibeLogger Interviews and the standalone Vibe Voice Input helper.
- [Lowe's Product Expert](https://www.lowesinnovationlabs.com/projects/lowe-s-product-expert): Official project page for the custom GPT prototype Jay designed and built before leading its organizational path to launch.
- [Lowe's Digital Home Platform](https://corporate.lowes.com/newsroom/press-releases/lowes-introduces-new-lowes-digital-home-platform-giving-its-loyalty-members-personalized-home-maintenance-support-11-04-24): The production expression of the Home Data initiative Jay owned and led in Innovation Labs. Jay's account covers the $10M+ initiative, 140M+ U.S.-home data pipeline, agentic itemization workflows, and his leadership of the team through direct-report manager Naveen Jammula. Lowe's verifies the production launch and Labs attribution, [documented its CES 2025 showcase and expansion into MyLowe's Home](https://corporate.lowes.com/newsroom/stories/fresh-thinking/5-tech-savvy-ways-lowes-simplifying-homeownership), and [Jammula publicly described the result as the team's hard work](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/naveen-jammula-54620579_lowes-introduces-new-lowes-digital-home-activity-7259715779669983232-0kgg).
- [Lowe's 3D Product Visualization](https://www.lowesinnovationlabs.com/projects/3d-product-visualization): Official account of the 3D commerce platform charter Jay led.
- Granted U.S. patents: Jay is one of seven named co-inventors on two related patents assigned to Lowe's for modeling physical products as virtual objects and arranging them in 3D environments: [US 12,189,915](https://patents.justia.com/patent/12189915) and [US 12,211,161](https://patents.justia.com/patent/12211161).
- [Knock](https://www.knockcrm.com/): Multifamily CRM company Jay co-founded and served as CTO from 2014 to 2018. He led the original product and engineering work across product design, application engineering, data, infrastructure, hiring, onboarding, and support. The company later reached 2M+ apartment units and was acquired by RealPage in 2022; transaction terms were not disclosed, as reflected in [contemporaneous reporting](https://www.geekwire.com/2022/real-estate-property-management-software-giant-realpage-to-acquire-seattle-startup-knock/) and the [acquisition announcement](https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220930005031/en/RealPage-Announces-Definitive-Agreement-to-Acquire-Knock-CRM).

## Profiles

- [GitHub](https://github.com/jayzeng): Open-source work and repositories.
- [LinkedIn](https://linkedin.com/in/jayzeng): Professional profile.