Operating quality over novelty.
Eight sites, one practice. Each a different lens on the same work.
Infrastructure and platform leadership. Teams and systems that hold up under load.
Most of my work sits where storage, transfer, identity, and observability meet the teams that run them. The foundations a research or product organisation depends on in order to move quickly without losing the trust it has earned.
At EMBL-EBI I took the FIRE archive from 15 PB to more than 150 PB, consolidated 35 transfer endpoints to 9 with a fivefold throughput gain, and led identity modernisation across six sites and five thousand users.
What I am most interested in now is the wider picture: architecture that lasts, operating models that produce sensible decisions without heroics, and the conditions under which strong engineers do their best work.
The leadership side is as concrete as the engineering: an annual budget of around £1M, eight direct reports and roughly twenty influenced, a development team grown from two people to eight, and large-scale storage procurement carried from requirement to award.
The sites indexed above show the same practice from different angles: the operator, the strategist, the small-business delivery surface, and the tools and notes I maintain alongside all of it.
Leadership built on repeated exposure to hard problems.
Deputy Head of Operations
Multidisciplinary teams across orchestration, monitoring, authentication, transfer, and mail. 8 direct reports, c. 20 influenced, £1M annual budget. FIRE archive growth from 15 PB to 150 PB+. Unified monitoring across 4,500 servers. Institution-wide IAM modernisation. Completed a nine-year EMBL-EBI tenure at the contractual maximum, staying six months beyond by exception.
Active Archive Manager · Transfer & IAM Lead
Designed and delivered the FIRE archive system. Consolidated 35 transfer-service endpoints to 9, reducing complexity by 94% and increasing throughput by 500%. Led the UK Biobank COVID-19 data ingest (3.9 PB under critical deadline). Initiated IAM modernisation across 6 EMBL sites for 5,000+ users.
Solutions Architect · Technical Service Manager
Customer-facing solutions architecture for enterprise HPC, private cloud, and database platforms. Secured >$1M in new business. Deployed 200+ node HPC clusters in under 16 minutes.
Infrastructure Team Lead · Technical Consultant
Led infrastructure delivery teams across Linux, Windows, AIX, and macOS environments. Managed customer-facing HPC and enterprise deployments with contractual SLAs.
Research Infrastructure & Platforms Lead
Built and operated the research computing platform supporting growth from 50 to 250 people. Managed HPC, storage, and network infrastructure for media and signal-processing research.
Executive education and professional certification.
Cambridge Judge Business School
CTO Programme — Organisational Leadership (2024–2025). Strategic Thinking for the CXO (2025). Steering Complex Projects (2024–2025).
Saïd Business School, Oxford
Oxford Executive Finance Programme (2025–2026). BSc Computer Science & Engineering, Universitat Ramon Llull — La Salle, Barcelona (2001–2005).
ITIL 4 DPI · PRINCE2 Agile
ITIL 4 Strategist: Direct, Plan & Improve (2026). PRINCE2 Agile® Practitioner (2020). ITIL v4 Foundation (2023).
Technical credentials
NVIDIA Accelerated Data Science & Adding Knowledge to LLMs (2025). Red Hat RHCSA + RHCE (2011). Oracle 11g OCA + OCP (2014–2015).
BCS · chartered track
Member, BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT (No. 995178141, since 2026). CITP application under assessment. Google Professional Cloud Architect in progress.
Foundations are permanent.
Architectures designed for decade-long operational excellence — not for the next demo.
Systems I run. The same operating discipline, at every scale.
Everything I run in production is self-hosted, sits behind a single identity provider and a TLS-terminating edge, and is fully monitored. The discipline applied to a 150 PB archive is applied here too: single sign-on, full observability, off-site replication, and documented runbooks.
- Public services behind one identity provider and a TLS edge
- Metrics and alerting across every host and service (Prometheus, Grafana)
- Off-site ZFS replication with tested recovery runbooks
- A local-first AI inference stack (Ollama, LiteLLM, WhisperX, Qdrant)
- Private git with CI on self-hosted runners
- Automation, documentation, and CRM on the same platform
Software I have built and shipped.
Distavo
Menu-bar app: recordings become Markdown meeting notes through your own WhisperX and Ollama servers. Local-first, privacy-first.
Gemina VPN
Dual-uplink reliability tool. Traffic runs over two links at once, so calls and SSH sessions survive a connection drop.
Grid capacity map
Screening tool for Spanish grid connection capacity, using REE and DSO data, for siting large loads such as data centres and storage.
Engagements
Senior leadership and advisory work, plus selected consulting. The productised automation practice, a fixed-scope audit and its inspectable reference stack, lives at sme.riera.co.uk.