MR cv.riera.co.uk / career
cv.riera.co.uk

Platform engineering and infrastructure leadership, hands-on and accountable.

Summary

Twenty years of building and running data-intensive infrastructure across research, enterprise IT, and HPC. Looking for a London-based engineering leadership role in which technical depth and site-building are both part of the job.

AvailabilityActive, Q3 2026
LocationCambridgeshire · London onsite
Right to workUK, indefinite
Contactjoanmarcriera@gmail.com
20yrsInfrastructure
150PB+Data estate
4,500+Linux servers
35→9Transfer consolidation
§ 01 · Fit

Founding-team leadership, rooted in the platform.

0 → 1

Building the function

Built the platform services function at EMBL-EBI from no team, no playbook, and no existing culture. Hired the early engineers, defined ownership, introduced incident reviews, and set the standard.

Foundations

Platform, not just operations

Deployment patterns, observability, CI/CD, IAM, transfer runtimes, infrastructure-as-code. The underlying systems product teams rely on to move fast without losing credibility.

Posture

Availability and performance

Reducing platform sprawl, improving throughput, removing fragility. Keeping systems credible with the stakeholders who depend on them in production.

Presence

London site-building

Direct access to central London and happy to build in person. Interested in the hiring, standard-setting, and early-culture part of growing a new engineering office.

§ 02 · Experience

Leadership built on repeated exposure to hard problems.

2021 — 2026

Deputy Head of Operations

EMBL-EBI · European Bioinformatics Institute

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.

2016 — 2020

Active Archive Manager · Transfer & IAM Lead

EMBL-EBI

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.

2014 — 2016

Solutions Architect · Technical Service Manager

Atos (ex-Bull)

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.

2011 — 2014

Infrastructure Team Lead · Technical Consultant

BULL SAS

Led infrastructure delivery teams across Linux, Windows, AIX, and macOS environments. Managed customer-facing HPC and enterprise deployments with contractual SLAs.

2007 — 2011

Research Infrastructure & Platforms Lead

Fundació Barcelona Media 22@ — EURECAT

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.

§ 03 · Credentials

Executive education and technical certification.

Education

Cambridge Judge Business School

CTO Programme — Organisational Leadership (2024–2025). Strategic Thinking for the CXO (2025). Steering Complex Projects (2024–2025).

Education

Saïd Business School, Oxford

Oxford Executive Finance Programme (2025–2026). BSc Computer Science & Engineering, Universitat Ramon Llull — La Salle, Barcelona (2001–2005).

Certifications

ITIL 4 · PRINCE2 Agile

ITIL 4 Strategist: Direct, Plan & Improve (2026). PRINCE2 Agile® Practitioner (2020). ITIL v4 Foundation (2023).

Certifications

Technical credentials

NVIDIA Accelerated Data Science & Adding Knowledge to LLMs (2025). Red Hat RHCSA + RHCE (2011). Oracle 11g OCA + OCP (2014–2015).