Riley Branch

A local-first governance system that places deterministic, versioned constraints at explicit AI action boundaries.

What I led and delivered

• I took Kybercel from product thesis through architecture, product design, implementation, automated validation, and deployment. I directed specialized AI-agent workflows across product management, UX, architecture, development, QA, technical writing, and review while leading product strategy, market positioning, cost planning, and investor/pitch preparation.
• I designed a deterministic TypeScript core shared by the CLI, MCP server, Workbench, and runtime adapters so rule semantics, action-boundary decisions, and evidence remain consistent across delivery surfaces.
• I built governed workflows for repository and AI I/O review, approval gates, explicit action boundaries, redaction-aware audit evidence, remediation, source-backed policy packs, and fail-closed or degraded behavior that reports measured control strength without overstating prevention.

Technology: The product family uses a TypeScript monorepo, deterministic core packages, a CLI, an MCP server, a Next.js workbench, PostgreSQL, runtime adapters, audit controls, and automated validation.

View Kybercel project record

End-to-end product, platform, and business leadership for an independently built fintech application.

What I led and delivered

• I took Badgerlane from product definition through architecture, product design, full-stack development, automated testing, AWS deployment, and ongoing operations while leading product strategy, pre-seed fundraising preparation, investor pitches, vendor relations, and budgeting.
• I designed explicit trust and failure boundaries across onboarding, financial-data aggregation, rule-based monthly planning, subscription billing, authentication, role-aware operations, and tenant boundaries, including fail-closed routing when cash-flow confidence is insufficient.
• I built guarded delivery and recovery paths with Docker, Terraform, and AWS ECS, including environment-specific release controls, pre-cutover database migrations, health checks, rollback paths, backups, and restore planning.

Technology: The product and platform use React, Express, PostgreSQL with Drizzle, Python services, Stripe and Quiltt integrations, Docker, Terraform, and AWS platform services.

View Badgerlane project record

I built, onboarded, and trained the 11-engineer SRE and Platform Engineering organization, participated in candidate interviews, and owned team development and retention.

Leadership and delivery

• 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.

Scale and scope

• 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.

Selected results

• 40% year-over-year cloud-spend reduction
• 60% monitoring-cost reduction
• 3x deployment frequency
• 45% MTTR reduction
• 99.95% SLA adherence
• I developed Pura's disaster-recovery strategy.
• I built trust across product, frontend, backend, and mobile teams by improving shared tooling, alerting, and documentation.
• I standardized observability across metrics, logs, traces, and alerting; baked monitoring into infrastructure as code; built operational tooling; and reduced toil across self-hosted Kubernetes and EKS workloads.
• I built an executive dashboard covering errors, deployments, and uptime and presented reliability performance in QBRs and to Pura's board.

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.

Leadership and delivery

• 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.

Scale and scope

• 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.

Selected results

• 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

I worked across Lenovo, Stoneware, and Novell during this earlier-career phase.