Riley Brennan, Software Engineer & Tech Lead

Building scalable systems, automating tasks agentically, and leading teams that ship it quickly

Software engineer, tech lead, and recovering mathematician. For the last few years I've been building LLM-powered tools for financial-crimes investigations at Robinhood, and leading the cross-team projects that get them into production.

1,000+ hrs/mo
Investigator time saved by AI tooling
Greenfield
LLM pipelines, built from scratch
EU + UK
Crypto-screening launch I drove
10 yrs
Building systems and leading teams
About

The short version

I like solving the problem behind the problem. Lately, that mostly means AI.

I'm a software engineer with a background in math and statistics, and I've always been pulled toward the general solution instead of the one-off fix. For the last few years, that's mostly meant AI.

At Robinhood I build LLM systems for financial-crimes investigations: greenfield pipelines that read, summarise, and classify the way an investigator would, plus the AI tooling my own team uses to move faster. Alongside that, I've led the larger projects: a self-serve detection platform, the EU and UK crypto-screening launch, and the in-house stack that's replacing our Actimize vendor for filing reports to regulators. Each one was a cross-team effort I designed and drove.

Earlier on, I led inventory systems through a company-wide ERP migration at Google and broke a monolith into services at SPS Commerce. Different problems, same throughline: leave the people around me faster and better-equipped than I found them.

Contact

Let's talk.

Always happy to talk AI, financial-crimes engineering, leading messy cross-team projects, or any problem that's begging for a general solution.