Staff engineer · Infra / AI / Full-stack

Ryan Hughes

I build systems that scale and teams that ship.

A decade shipping at Google, Snap, and Motional scale — then I founded an engineering consultancy, hired 15+ engineers and landed 16+ clients, and sold it.

  • 2B+ req/day at Google
  • 250TB+ processed
  • 120M files in 72h
  • Founded → acquired
Google · Display AdsSnap · Internal ToolsMotional · Autonomous VehiclesFan Pier Labs · Founder · acquired
ryanhughes624@gmail.comgithub/ryanhughlinkedin/in/ryanhugh
Ryan Hughes

// professional overview

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. I like hard problems, big numbers, and robots.

// selected work

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.

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.

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.

TypeScript · Closure · A/B infrastructure

// trusted by

Google · Snap · Motional · OpenAI · Rupa Health

// people I work with

  • Curious Minds Healthtech — founded and led by Brian Autumn, provides fractional CTO and engineering leadership to early-stage healthcare software companies — HIPAA/SOC 2, security, and engineering hiring.
  • YoYoFuMedia — founded and led by YoYo Fu, provides SEO, Google Ads, and paid social marketing that drives consistent leads for service and e-commerce businesses.
  • Lokesh Kumar — a staff software engineer who has been instrumental in launching several of the projects I've worked on.

// beyond the day job

The numbers, the writing, the tinkering

0TB+

data processed

0M

files in 72 hours

0B+

requests/day surface

0%

latency reduction

0+

engineers hired & led

0+

clients incl. OpenAI

// side projects

  • OpenRecord

    openrecord.fanpierlabs.com ↗

    Let AI manage your healthcare — an MCP server that connects Claude to any Epic MyChart patient portal.

  • Search NEU

    searchneu.com ↗

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

  • crossbeam-cli

    docs ↗

    A CLI and Claude MCP server for Crossbeam partner data — that runs on the free plan, no paid API tier required.

  • Eames

    A macOS menu-bar app that joins your meetings for you — on time, muted, hands-free.

// writing

all posts ↗

// 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