Ryan Hughes

Staff engineer · Infra / AI / Full-stack

I build systems that scale and teams that ship.

Staff-level engineer across infra, AI, and full-stack. A decade of shipping at Google, Snap, and Motional scale — then founding, growing, and selling an engineering consultancy. Lately: AI agents, financial infrastructure, and the hard problems that live at the edge of what's possible.

// career.log

A decade of scale

  1. [01] DETECTED: GOOGLE · 2019 – 2021 · conf 0.99

    Google

    Software Engineer — Display Ads

    Shipping on a 2B+ request/day surface

    • Led urgent ad-iframe XSS fixes on a surface serving 2B+ requests a day — coordinating 10+ partner teams, lawyers, and external companies, ramping experiments 0.1% → 100%.
    • 15+ projects across security, compliance, and performance.
    • 90% code coverage, 15+ A/B experiments and holdbacks with custom GoogleSQL metrics.

    TypeScript · Google Closure · C++ · Protobuf · GoogleSQL

  2. [02] DETECTED: SNAP · 2022 · conf 0.99

    Snap

    Senior Software Engineer — Internal Tools

    An approval system for 200+ engineering teams

    • Built and owned an internal approval system used by 200+ Snap engineering teams.
    • Eliminated a legacy codebase's tech debt: no TypeScript, no tests, 1k+ lint errors, 40+ stale dependencies — gone.
    • Mentored two junior engineers from onboarding to independent feature ownership.

    TypeScript · React · Node.js · GCP

  3. [03] DETECTED: MOTIONAL · 2023 – 2024 · conf 0.99

    Motional

    Senior Software Engineer — Autonomous Vehicles

    Observability for 1TB+ of AV sensor data

    • Owned the observability frontend for terabytes of autonomous-vehicle sensor data.
    • Cut critical visualization load times by 90%+ — migrated DynamoDB to Redshift, 1000x fewer bytes shipped to the browser.
    • Identified and drove a 99%+ latency reduction in self-driving sim visualizations via a Postgres → Redshift ETL pipeline.

    TypeScript · React · AWS · Redshift · Postgres

  4. [04] DETECTED: FAN PIER LABS · 2024 – 2026 · conf 0.99

    Fan Pier Labs

    Founder & CEO — acquired by Valere

    Founded it, grew it, sold it

    • Architected and led 18+ AI, infra, and full-stack projects for 16+ clients including OpenAI and Rupa Health.
    • Processed 250TB+ and 245M+ files across 9 distributed ETL and infra projects.
    • 3 production RAG/AI systems, 11 containerized production web apps.
    • Hired and led 15+ engineers in 1–3 person pods; built the whole engagement machine — SOWs, sprints, retros.

    OpenAI · TypeScript · Python · AWS · K8s · Postgres · Clickhouse

// telemetry

0TB+

data processed

0M

files in 72 hours

0B+

requests/day surface

0%

latency reduction

0+

engineers hired & led

0+

clients incl. OpenAI

// case studies

Problems worth telling

CASE_01 · 50x parallel · ~72h · 120M files

120M files in 72 hours

An IP litigation firm shipped us a hard drive: 120 million recursively-compressed discovery documents they needed searchable.

Instead of a weeks-long pipeline running on Windows servers, I pushed everything to S3 and built a Fargate cluster running depth-first decompression with SQS as the stack. Fifty parallel tasks chewed through all 120M files in about three days, indexed via S3 inventory for retrieval.

AWS Fargate · SQS · S3 · EFS · Python

CASE_02 · 90%+ faster · 1000x fewer bytes

The 1000x dashboard

The BI dashboard downloaded entire datasets to the browser — and crashed on the ones that mattered.

I led the frontend migration and drove the API-contract and architecture decisions: DynamoDB out, Redshift's columnar engine in, Fargate services in between. Six engineers, six months, 90%+ load-time improvement on the tooling engineering teams, operations teams, and management used daily.

Redshift · DynamoDB · Fargate · React

CASE_03 · 2B+ req/day · 10+ teams · 0 incidents

Defusing XSS at 2B req/day

A long-known XSS vector in Google's ad iframes — on a surface serving billions of requests a day, where any mistake is a headline.

Led the fix end-to-end: coordinated 10+ partner teams, sat with lawyers and external teams, and ramped experiments from 0.1% to 100% of traffic. Shipped the patch with zero incidents and no measurable hit to revenue or latency at full scale.

TypeScript · Closure · A/B infrastructure

CASE_04 · 67k users · 1.8M searches · alive 10 years

Search NEU

As a student: search every class and professor at Northeastern, faster than the registrar could.

Scraped 1M+ pages a day across 10+ sites, indexed into Elasticsearch with sub-20ms responses, ran at 99%+ uptime on AWS. Handed it off to four student founders — it's still running a decade later.

Elasticsearch · AWS · React · Node

searchneu.com ↗Khoury News ↗Sandbox handoff ↗