Riley Branch
I build and lead platform and engineering organizations that turn reliability, cloud economics, and delivery systems into business leverage, while remaining close enough to current technical work to exercise sound implementation judgment.
- Head of Platform/SRE
- VP of Engineering
- Director of Platform Engineering
Current independent work
Active product work demonstrating current engineering judgment across applied AI governance, fintech, platform delivery, security, and operations.
Kybercel
Chief Technology Officer and Founding Engineer.
A local-first governance system that places deterministic, versioned constraints at explicit AI action boundaries.
The work demonstrates current judgment across platform architecture, developer workflows, security boundaries, governance, product delivery, and honest reporting of control strength.
Badgerlane
Chief Technology Officer and Founding Engineer.
End-to-end product, platform, and business leadership for an independently built fintech application.
The work demonstrates current end-to-end engineering judgment where product experience, platform reliability, security boundaries, business rules, integrations, and operations have to remain coherent.
RileyBranch.me
Designer, engineer, and operator.
A static professional evidence site built to connect leadership claims to reviewed public records without weakening privacy or release boundaries.
The work demonstrates rapid adoption of a new toolchain and end-to-end ownership across product design, static architecture, typed content, testing, accessibility, privacy, release engineering, and Cloudflare delivery.
Leadership record
Recent operating scope and attributable outcomes selected for rapid hiring evaluation.
Pura
SRE Manager
- I built, onboarded, and trained the 11-engineer SRE and Platform Engineering organization, participated in candidate interviews, and owned team development and retention.
- I managed strategic vendor relationships, including AWS, and translated cross-functional requirements into platform and reliability priorities.
- Over several months, I partnered directly with engineering teams to define service-specific SLOs and error budgets and operationalize SLA reporting. Teams operating within their error budgets could deploy without SRE approval, while release-level reliability tracking localized regressions and shortened MTTR.
- I served as a lead technical contributor to RFPs by researching and documenting solution options, gathering cross-team peer feedback, and translating tradeoffs into vendor and architecture recommendations.
- I focused platform engineering on developer experience, self-service tooling, and reducing developer toil.
- The SRE and Platform Engineering organization included 11 engineers.
- The organization included four U.S.-based engineers and seven engineers in Vietnam.
- Platform tooling and reliability practices supported an engineering organization of approximately 70 engineers.
Organization outcome
Cloud economics
- 40% year-over-year cloud-spend reduction
- 60% monitoring-cost reduction
Organization outcomes during my platform/SRE leadership at Pura.
Delivery and reliability
- 3x deployment frequency
- 45% MTTR reduction
- 99.95% SLA adherence
Organization outcomes during my platform/SRE leadership at Pura.
Adobe
Customer Success Engineer (AEM), Customer Success Engineer (Campaign), and Senior Manager Site Reliability Engineer
- From 2015–2019, I managed 12 concurrent enterprise Adobe Experience Manager customers as their designated technical operations advisor, helping launch several multimillion-dollar programs for Fortune 500 organizations across retail, cruise and leisure, news media, airlines, telecommunications, and technology while serving as Adobe's customer-facing subject-matter expert.
- From 2019–2022, I continued customer-facing work as a Customer Success Engineer for Adobe Campaign, contributed to Adobe's first billion-email marketing send, and handled a major airline's zero-downtime Campaign migration while partnering with AWS to pioneer new database-migration techniques.
- I led operational readiness for multiple Fortune 500 go-lives on distributed systems with four-nines availability requirements, worked with Adobe's internally built Kubernetes platform, and presented SRE performance and priorities in QBRs.
- I led incident management for Fortune 500 customers during outages, critical situations, and zero-day vulnerability response by running war rooms, coordinating diagnosis and recovery, updating stakeholders, documenting fixes, and producing RCAs. Incident learnings resulted in additional monitoring, early-warning detection, and product code changes.
- I led enterprise data-center-to-AWS migrations and AEM upgrades across 60+ environments using zero-downtime delivery practices.
- As a security champion for Adobe Connect, I contributed to SOC 2 readiness.
- I built, onboarded, and trained a 10-member SRE team, participated in candidate interviews, and owned team development and retention through individual 30/60/90-day workload plans that supported capacity-aware planning, prioritization, and tradeoffs.
- Operated 60+ Adobe Experience Manager environments.
- Governed $22M+ in annual AWS/GCP spend as part of broader Adobe operating scope.
Organization outcome
Enterprise readiness and delivery
- SOC 2 readiness for Adobe Connect
- Enterprise data-center-to-AWS migrations
- Adobe's first billion-email marketing send
- Zero-downtime Adobe Campaign migration for a major airline
Organization outcomes during my security champion, SRE, and customer success engineering work at Adobe.
Work, writing, and career record
Interested in discussing platform, SRE, or engineering leadership? Contact Riley.