People grow with people.

My name is Shannon Duncan. I live in Arkansas and work as Principal Architect of Agentic AI at LiveRamp.

What I work on

By day, I help build agentic systems: tools that help engineers do their jobs, platforms for building and deploying agents, and the frameworks and harnesses that make them work. I also work with our teams on bringing AI and agents into our products and building the platforms and APIs that let others integrate their own AI systems with ours.

My career has taken me from mainframes and mainframe databases to petabyte-scale data engineering, including Hadoop clusters with 80,000 cores, and building new products. Over the past few years, my focus has been on real AI systems and platforms that teams and customers use every day.

Why I started Hackers in the Loop

I’ve also spent a lot of time thinking about how to pay it forward. I feel blessed to be where I am today, largely because other people invested their time, energy, and knowledge in me. I can name people who changed the trajectory of my life. I want to offer that kind of support to others. Hackers in the Loop is how I hope to do it.

The cluster I built supports my own open source projects, but it has much more capacity than I need day to day. There will be times when compute sits idle, and I want to make that capacity available to people in Hackers in the Loop.

For me, Hackers in the Loop has two goals.

1. Invest in others as others have invested in me. Build a community where we take time to listen, teach, and appreciate one another and the things we’re building.
2. Provide resources through grants. Help people learn, research, and build with open source technology.

I hope Hackers in the Loop becomes something meaningful for someone. Even if it changes just one person’s life, it will have been worth it to me.