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cv.riera.co.uk
Personal site, operator profile, and hands-on infrastructure layer. This is the best starting point if you want to understand how I think about building, running, and improving systems.
Current CV siteFocused on OpenAI's London infrastructure buildout
Hands-on platform engineering, infrastructure, and site leadership
I build load-bearing platforms and the teams that earn trust in production.
I am a hands-on engineering and operations leader with 20+ years across research infrastructure, enterprise IT, and HPC environments. I currently serve as Deputy Head of Operations at EMBL-EBI, helping shape services behind a 150PB+ archive, high-volume data transfer, identity systems, and observability used by researchers around the world.
The role I am most interested in now is a London-based infrastructure leadership seat where I can act as both a technical leader and a site builder: helping found or scale a talent-dense team, raise the technical bar, and own the platform foundations behind availability, deployment, observability, CI/CD, and reliable product delivery.
- Cambridgeshire, UK
- Targeting OpenAI's London ChatGPT infrastructure leadership role and closely related platform roles
- Comfortable with both executive conversations and terminal-level problem solving
- Direct London access and happy to build in person when the role needs it
Related Surfaces
Three public surfaces, each showing a different layer of the work.
cv.riera.co.uk is the CV and operator layer. cxo.riera.co.uk is the strategy and executive layer. sme.riera.co.uk is the practical SME systems and demo layer. The live automation stack and app URLs remain on joanmarcriera.es.
Strategy Layer
cxo.riera.co.uk
The executive and strategy-facing layer: operating models, transformation, leadership framing, and broader decision-making context for technical work.
Open cxo.riera.co.ukSME Systems Layer
sme.riera.co.uk
The practical small-business systems and demo layer. It provides a front door for the SME automation stack while leaving the live applications running on joanmarcriera.es.
Open sme.riera.co.ukWhat I Bring
Three things I repeatedly get hired to do.
Build and reshape platform functions
I have built teams and operating models from scratch more than once, including at EMBL-EBI and earlier at Barcelona Media. That means defining ownership, standards, service boundaries, and the culture needed for engineers to do strong work.
Turn fragile systems into dependable services
My background is full of messy estates: legacy transfer stacks, archive migrations, fragmented monitoring, identity sprawl, and operational bottlenecks. I reduce complexity, improve reliability, and make services easier for teams and users to live with.
Connect technical depth to business judgment
I am comfortable with architecture reviews, procurement, service design, cost models, and long-term roadmaps. The Cambridge CTO programme and Oxford executive finance studies sharpened that layer, but the habit was already there: make technical decisions that stand up commercially and operationally.
Selected Impact
Recent examples that show range, scale, and outcomes.
15PB to 140PB
Scaled EMBL-EBI's archive from specialist system to strategic platform
Helped take FIRE from an emerging archive capability to a production platform supporting major scientific resources, with governance and service practices that let it grow without losing trust.
15PB/month
Reworked transfer services while cutting complexity
Consolidated roughly 35 transfer platforms down to 9, improved throughput by 500%, and turned a historically fragile estate into something dependable during periods of intense demand.
2025
Enabled EMBL-EBI's first zero-downtime data centre migration
Pushed for VLAN stretching and cross-team coordination that made a seamless migration possible, removing a class of operational pain that had previously been accepted as normal.
>100PB
Led the archive tender that improved resilience and reduced cost
Personally drove a major tape archive procurement, cutting disaster recovery costs while improving the long-term resilience of mission-critical data services.
OpenAI Fit
Why this background maps well to a founding infrastructure leadership role in London.
I have not built LLM inference systems directly. What I have done, repeatedly, is build the kind of runtime, reliability, deployment, and operating foundations that ambitious product and research teams depend on when they need to move fast without breaking trust.
Founding-team leadership
At EMBL-EBI I built the platform services function from zero: no existing team, no playbook, no established culture. I hired the early engineers, defined service boundaries, introduced incident reviews and ownership expectations, and helped create a high-trust, high-agency engineering culture.
Platform foundations, not just operations
My work has covered the underlying systems product teams rely on: deployment patterns, service integration architecture, observability, CI/CD, IAM, network changes, transfer runtimes, infrastructure as code, and Kubernetes-era service modernisation.
Availability, scalability, and performance mindset
I am used to operating services that matter, where reliability and delivery speed both count. That has meant reducing platform sprawl, improving throughput, removing operational fragility, and keeping systems credible with stakeholders who depend on them every day.
London site-building is a feature, not a compromise
I live south of Cambridge and can get into London directly. I want the in-person part of building a new engineering presence: hiring carefully, setting standards early, and helping create the local culture of a growing office rather than only participating remotely.
Skills
Titles vary across industries. The underlying capabilities are more stable.
Rather than anchor this page to one job title or a stack of tailored CVs, these are the capability areas that show up consistently across my work.
Platform Engineering
- Platform-as-a-product operating models
- Service integration architecture
- Kubernetes and container orchestration
- REST API and runtime service design
- CI/CD and deployment workflows
- Infrastructure as code with Puppet, Ansible, and SaltStack
Reliability & Operations
- Observability and monitoring strategy
- Incident response and blameless reviews
- Service ownership and operational discipline
- SLO-oriented reliability thinking
- Change management and release coordination
- ITIL-aligned service design integrated with DevOps and SRE practices
Infrastructure & Cloud
- Large Linux estates and hybrid infrastructure
- AWS, Azure, and GCP evaluation for long-term platform strategy
- Network architecture, LACP, and data centre migration planning
- Disaster recovery and business continuity design
- Bare-metal provisioning and systems automation
- OpenStack, private cloud, and enterprise infrastructure modernisation
Data & Performance Systems
- Petabyte-scale storage and archive platforms
- High-volume data transfer services
- S3, HTTP, and object-storage access patterns
- HPC environments, scheduling, and performance tuning
- Capacity planning across compute, storage, and network layers
- Research-to-production transitions for data-intensive systems
Security & Identity
- IAM modernisation and access governance
- LDAP, SAML, OAuth, and federated identity patterns
- MFA and lifecycle automation
- Risk reduction through platform simplification
- Cross-team security and compliance coordination
- Pragmatic security aligned with operational reality
Leadership & Delivery
- 0 to 1 team building and hiring
- Coaching, mentoring, and technical bar setting
- Stakeholder alignment without direct authority
- Procurement, vendor evaluation, and cost modelling
- Roadmaps, governance, and operating model design
- Executive communication grounded in technical detail
Experience
Leadership built on repeated exposure to hard infrastructure problems.
2021 - Present
Deputy Head of Operations, EMBL-EBI
Leading multidisciplinary teams across orchestration, monitoring, authentication, transfer, mail, and other central services. Responsible for reliable delivery, roadmap shaping, stakeholder alignment, and long-term sustainability of core research infrastructure.
2016 - 2020
Technical Lead to Platform Services Manager, EMBL-EBI
Grew from transfer services leadership into platform leadership across archive systems, automation, observability, and service-oriented delivery. This period included major FIRE growth, Kubernetes-era redesign work, and cross-functional governance around data services.
2011 - 2016
Solutions Architect and Service Manager, Atos / Bull
Owned architecture, service delivery, and team leadership across enterprise customers. Worked across OpenStack, HPC, big data, automation, and service management, including large bare-metal rollouts and multi-year infrastructure planning.
2007 - 2011
Research Infrastructure and Platforms Lead, FBM Eurecat
Built an internal IT function for a fast-growing research organisation, hired and mentored engineers, and supported a broad estate spanning identity, messaging, monitoring, backup, and research platforms.
Credentials
Executive development backed by deep technical roots.
- Chief Technology Officer Programme, Cambridge Judge Business School, 2024-2025
- Oxford Executive Finance Programme, Saïd Business School, 2025-2026 (in progress)
- ITIL 4 Direct, Plan & Improve (DPI)
- ITIL Foundation
- PRINCE2 Agile Foundation & Practitioner
- Earlier hands-on certifications include Red Hat RHCSA/RHCE and Oracle OCA/OCP
Some of the older technical certifications have expired, but they still reflect years of practical systems, Linux, automation, and database work before I moved deeper into broader leadership roles.
What I Am Looking For
Roles where platform thinking is treated as a strategic advantage.
- Founding or early London infrastructure leadership roles, especially at OpenAI or similarly ambitious AI organisations
- Engineering Manager roles spanning reliability, deployment systems, observability, and internal platforms
- Technical leadership roles where hiring, culture-setting, and architecture decisions all matter
- Environments with high ambiguity, high standards, and meaningful in-office collaboration
Contact
If OpenAI London needs someone who can lead the platform and still debug the platform, let's talk.
Email is the fastest route. LinkedIn and GitHub are here if you want more context first.