Caleb John

I'm a co-founder of LucidBox, an engineering consultancy in Alberta focused on early-stage technical work for startups and industry. I lead technical decisions and build initial systems for clients, primarily in SaaS, heavy industry, and energy technology.

Before LucidBox, I was the first engineer at Solartility, a virtual-power-plant startup. I grew the engineering team from one to five and helped secure over $5M in grant funding. I built the real-time energy-arbitrage engine and designed the VPP and DERMS platforms that supported it. After establishing the core technical infrastructure, I left to start LucidBox.

My thesis work was on applied machine learning systems. I built and published an interpretable rule-learning model for early identification of chronic homelessness, trained on 12 years of shelter data covering over 40,000 individuals. That work, along with research in quantum communications, has been published in several peer-reviewed journals.

The consistent focus across these roles is translating complex technical problems into working products. Past work includes recovering stalled embedded firmware projects and shipping hardware on short timelines, as well as moving research prototypes into production systems.

On my own time I contribute to open source—I've mentored for Google Summer of Code three times with Joplin—and tinker with NixOS and self-hosting. For the full story, check my CV.

If you would like to discuss a project, you can reach me by email. (Address is in the sidebar.)