Team
The team executing the research.
SwarmEngines LLC is a U.S. small business. The principal investigator is committed at ≥20 hours/week. The founding team has shipped production applications to Fortune-500 clients and operates an AgentCore-based pilot as the substrate for the Phase I research.
Principal investigator
Russell Thornton, CEO and PI.
Russell Thornton
Founder & CEO, SwarmEngines LLC
Russell is a builder-operator with two decades of shipping production software at the intersection of mobile, web, and AWS cloud. He is an AWS-certified Solutions Architect and an Amazon Bedrock AgentCore early-adopter, with production agent deployments since the platform's GA in 2025.
Prior to SwarmEngines, he founded a boutique application-development practice that has shipped 100+ production applications to clients including Adobe, eBay, Venafi, Aptive, UVU, and Amber Alert GPS. That operating context — close exposure to the failure modes of AI deployed into real businesses, not benchmarks — is the source of the open-problem framing that drives this research program.
LinkedIn · linkedin.com/in/thorntonrussellPI commitment
≥ 20 hours/week to SwarmEngines LLC
Credentials
AWS Certified Solutions Architect
Citizenship
U.S. citizen (≥51% U.S. equity)
Based
Lehi, Utah · United States
Prior shipping
The team has delivered production software at scale, to enterprise customers, repeatedly.
Prior to SwarmEngines, the founding team shipped 100+ production applications through a separate consulting practice for clients including:
That track record establishes the team's ability to ship production software at quality. SwarmEngines LLC is a separate research-and-engineering company; the prior consulting practice is referenced here only for capability context.
Technical advisors
Distributed systems, multi-agent AI safety, and SMB-vertical operations.
Advisor roster is being finalized. Three areas are under recruitment: (1) distributed systems / serverless cold-start research, (2) AI safety and multi-agent coordination theory, (3) SMB-vertical operations and industry credibility. Contact research@swarmengines.com if any of these are areas you work in.
Collaborators
Institutional and platform partnerships that enable the work.
Amazon Web Services
Production AgentCore deployments since the platform's GA. Bedrock + Firecracker microVM isolation is the substrate for the Phase I research.
Academic partner
Conversations underway with a U.S. computer-science department to host the Problem-2 evaluation harness as a teaching artifact for AI-safety curricula. Partnership formalization in progress.