Director of Engineering at Cash App

An inclusive, visionary & inspirational leader with deep expertise at the intersection between science, technology and society. Riley leads the Automation Engineering group at Square, a large organization responsible for building the communication and data platforms that unlock automation, personalization and machine learning throughout all Square products. I joined Square to work on problems at the intersection of commerce, large scale datasets on human activity, messaging and automation. I spent two years as Senior Staff Engineer building graph applications, an ML platform and focusing on cross-sell and new advertising pilots and the last 3 years building an organization from the ground up to close gaps that prevent us from effectively using our data in real-time event based systems to power personalization in communication and product experiences. Previously a startup founder/CTO, built a DARPA & VC-backed business (TalkTo) focused on automating consumer to business communication (think Google Duplex or Facebook M before these existed). Acquired by Path. Spent a year as Engineering Director at Path before Path was acquired, and joined Square to continue pursuing problems at the intersection of Commerce, Messaging and Automation. I have a PhD in physics from UCLA and I won the 2009 DARPA Network Challenge while I was a Society-in-Science Postdoc at the Media Lab at MIT. Prior to that I was one of the early data scientists focused on exploring the hidden patterns in large-scale datasets of human behavior and communication and measuring virality in online networks. In addition I am a long-time professional public speaker, I have consulted for startups, businesses, the FBI, and have testified before the US Senate. I’ve built viral media campaigns for several books and the United Nations. My work has been featured in The New York Times and New Scientist, published in Science, PNAS and I have appeared on CNN and The Colbert Report.