Jon Lim

Lead the product team for Zillow Rentals.

I led the Zillow product team for core Zillow's app, website, and comms channels including SEO/GEO. The key R&D investment was the integrated buyer experience: connecting with an agent, financing, insuring, and ultimately closing on a home.

I'm a Member of the Explorer's Club, a society dedicated to the advancement of field research, scientific exploration, and conservation. Recently I have been leading a scientific expedition to the Galápagos Islands where we will be using drones & computer vision save the world's most endangered species from extinction: the Fernandina Giant Tortoise. Only one specimen remains, and if we don't find a mating pair, the entire species goes extinct. We will be flying a fleet of drones and using AI computer vision to detect tortoise carapaces from the sky, while running on-the-ground linear transects on an inhospitable active volcano. Previously, I participated in an expedition to an under-explored jungle in Borneo where we discovered a new species of snail and managed to sequence its DNA in the field with a truly magical Oxford Nanopore gene sequencing device.

I serve on the Customer Advisory Board for Replit, an Agentic AI company that envisions a world where turning an idea into working software is as intuitive as drawing a picture or writing a story.

Invented & patented AWS EventBridge, which powers billions of software system interactions. AWS EventBridge is crucial for AI, particularly in generative and agentic AI systems, because it provides the real-time, asynchronous, and decoupled event-driven architecture (EDA) necessary for connecting AI models to data sources and acting upon their inferences. By acting as a central event bus, it allows developers to build autonomous AI agents that perceive data changes, reason about them using services like Amazon Bedrock, and act immediately on their environments. If you accidentally turn it off, a surprisingly large portion of the internet breaks. Patent: US11436653B1

Experience in digital transformation. This includes building secure cloud architecture and applications for online & offline retail, focusing on: payments & point of sale, inventory management, Fire Tablet, and Amazon Echo.

Succession plan for dad’s real estate business. Did everything from finance to swinging hammers.