Jonathan Avni
Product Leader. AI Builder.
13+ years shipping developer APIs and payments infrastructure at Coinbase, Paxos, Pinterest, and Yahoo. Now building at the intersection of payments and AI agents: training models, shipping products, and writing about what I learn.

Where I've Been
Yahoo
Product ManagerFounding team member of Yahoo Gemini, powering monetization across Yahoo properties (over 1B MAUs at the time). Grew revenue from launch to $1B+ run-rate.
Launched Marketing APIs used by 100+ partners, accounted for 50%+ of 2018 revenue.
Coinbase
Senior Product Manager, Payments PlatformsBuilt payments and trading infrastructure for Coinbase Retail and Enterprise customer-facing products, moving hundreds of billions of dollars in annual transaction volume.
Paxos
Product Lead, Stablecoins and BankingBuilt and launched PayPal USD, a leading fully regulated USD stablecoin, and scaled it to a market cap of over $3B through dozens of distribution partner integrations.
Independent
AI BuilderTrained an LLM from scratch, published fine-tuned adapters on Hugging Face, built a RAG platform with paying users, and open-sourced two agent frameworks.
A common thread: I've always chased the most interesting technology of the moment - ads marketplaces, social APIs, crypto protocols, stablecoins - and now AI.
Selected Projects

Sigildex
LiveApproval records for AI agent skills: lock what a human approved, detect when the installed copy drifts, diff what changed
Started as a hosted, agent-first trust layer for agent skills: a REST API and MCP server that let an agent discover, inspect and verify skills, with x402 micropayments on Base and a three-layer safety-scoring pipeline over a ~200K-row corpus. After a summer spent rebuilding the index, I wound the hosted service down and shipped the piece that stands on its own: a small open-source CLI (lock, check, diff) that records the exact bytes of a skill a human approved and tells you, file by file, when the installed copy drifts. Local, deterministic, no network. Ships with an Agent Skill, llms.txt, a CI example and a postmortem.

LLM Fine-tuning Course
LiveFine-tuning a 3B language model end-to-end on the HF Hub: SFT, DPO, and a vision-language sidetrack
I worked through Hugging Face's Smol Fine-Tuning Language Models course and shipped a preference-aligned small model to the Hub. SmolLM3-3B-Base taken through SFT on 12k summarization examples, then DPO on 12k preference pairs, with DPO continuing to train the same LoRA rather than starting fresh (and the pre-DPO state frozen as the reference policy). A SmolVLM2-2.2B ChartQA adapter sits alongside as a vision-language sidetrack, where LoRA adapts the LLM while the SigLIP vision encoder stays frozen. Four LoRA adapters published, all reproducible from the public code.

Deep Research Agent
LiveAn agentic research system with planning, sub-agent delegation, and human-in-the-loop approval
A deep research agent that takes a question, breaks it into a research plan, waits for human approval, then hands research tasks to isolated sub-agents that search the web and synthesize findings. Uses file-based context offloading instead of context stuffing, and runs Gemma 4 locally via Ollama or any cloud LLM.

KuchiClaw
LiveA minimal AI agent framework: ephemeral containers, living file memory, filesystem IPC
A personal AI agent that runs 24/7 on a VPS, talks through Telegram, manages its own memory in living markdown files, runs scheduled tasks (morning briefs, self-maintenance heartbeats), and reaches email and a shared Google Calendar through a simple skills system. Built on the Claude Agent SDK with ephemeral Docker containers as the security boundary, then hardened for unattended operation: HMAC-signed container output, fail-closed startup, crash recovery with a crash-loop circuit breaker, per-group isolation, and daily git backups of the agent's evolved memory.

TinyBrain
LiveAn AI that earns and spends money autonomously via x402
An inference service built on top of TinyChat that charges $0.01/query via the x402 payment protocol. Routes complex queries to DeepSeek R1 for ~$0.001, pocketing the difference. Includes complexity classification, a "bar tab" payment mode with stateless HMAC-signed sessions, and wallet integration on Base mainnet.

TinyChat
LiveA 561M-parameter LLM trained from scratch for ~$95
A language model built from scratch: custom BPE tokenizer, GPT architecture with RoPE and Multi-Query Attention, trained on ~38B tokens from FineWeb-EDU, then fine-tuned for conversation. Deployed on Modal serverless GPU with a Next.js frontend.

Talk2Docs
SunsetA full-stack RAG platform for chatting with PDFs, URLs, and podcasts
A RAG platform for chatting with your documents: custom chunking, hybrid retrieval, query classification, multi-document synthesis, and citation validation. Built with Next.js, Supabase, Stripe, and Clerk, deployed on Vercel and Railway.
Writing
Lessons From Launching Sigildex: What I Learned Building for AI Agents
I set out to build a hosted trust layer for agent skills and ended up shipping a small open-source CLI. The postmortem has the full story. This is the short list of what I'd carry into any product whose user is an AI agent.
Two Models Today, Meta-Harnesses Tomorrow: How I Code With Claude and Codex
I build with two coding agents at once: Claude as the orchestrator that plans and holds context, and Codex as a bounded implementer and adversarial reviewer. Across sessions, the two models catch almost completely different bugs, and that gap is the point.
Upgrading My AI-Powered Second Brain With Reflexive Search
Progressive disclosure optimized how Claude searches my Obsidian vault. Reflexive search optimized when. The second turned out to matter more.