Andy Rifken
Agentic Engineering Leader
Oakland, CA
Please reach out on LinkedIn for contact info!

👋 Hello! I’m a player-coach software engineering leader focused on helping enterprises adopt agentic engineering effectively. Large engineering organizations have years of codebases and systems designed to be built, maintained, and operated by humans. By building cloud agents, knowledge graphs, and eval suites, we can automate the repeatable parts of the job and refocus software developers and knowledge workers on what they do best: using their domain expertise to build excellent products and customer experiences.

Senior Manager (IDP and Agentic Engineering Platform) • Zillow Group

SF Bay Area (Remote) • December 2025 - Present

• Led evolution of Internal Developer Portal / Service + Infrastructure catalog to be “agent first.” This enables both cloud/background and interactive agents to efficiently assemble context from knowledge about how existing software systems interact (network topology, service dependencies, data residency, etc).
• Architected and launched an early version of “cloud agents” (similar to “minions” at peer organizations), where developers can compose together context, tools, an agent harness, and network and identity/authorization policies to safely offload agentic workloads to isolated infrastructure. Evaluated ways to compose together in-house tools, context sources, triggers, and more with cloud agent sandboxes from third party suppliers, to maximize build vs. buy ROI. At the time of this writing, we are extending this design to separate “brain” from “hands,”* keeping LLM interactions inside the microVM, while enabling developers to define specific compute requirements for the agent environment. For example, this will enable mobile app developers to deploy cloud agents that run safely in arm64 sandboxes to make proxied remote tool calls to long-running macOS VMs and android/amd64 containers.
• Designed eval framework running on harbor for “agent readiness” of complex and diverse legacy software systems. General purpose agents “try to accomplish” specific tasks in these codebases, results/goal achievement is scored, and tasks are generated to improve the codebase under evaluation.
• Launched “AI Marketplace” in our IDP, enabling engineers, product managers, designers, and other employees to publish, discover, install, and share Agent Skills, MCP servers, Hooks, and more. The publish pipeline included checks for correctness (according to Anthropic’s spec), as well as vulnerability checks to protect against context injection and other attack vectors.
• Met regularly with both technical and non-technical employees across the enterprise to understand agents were “getting stuck” or producing poor results in their environments. Participated in demos and “AI days” from dozens of organizations to learn what folks are building with AI and how foundational agentic engineering primitives could accelerate their work. Designed program to enable successful/high-growth AI projects to “graduate” from within a team to serve the entire engineering department (starting with a very popular SRE agent built by one team, and in use by over 70 at the time of this writing).

* Credit: Anthropic

Senior Manager (Mobile Apps Platform) • Zillow Group

SF Bay Area (Remote) • October 2021 - December 2025

• Rechartered the Zillow Mobile App Platform team providing foundational architecture and CI/CD systems serving 150 iOS and Android developers at Zillow. Grew the team from 5 developers to 15, and split into highly focused iOS, Android, and infrastructure sub-teams, serving 200+ developers.
• Hired, led, grew engineers and engineering managers across all skill and experience levels – from interns, to Principal engineers, to first-time engineering managers
  
• Architected our macOS CI/CD infrastructure (powering all iOS CI workloads) as well as our Android CI/CD infrastructure, and trained mobile software engineers on the team in AWS and DevOps engineering, growing them into experts in building usable, resilient, self-healing, and easy-to-operate systems.
  
• Led platform product management programs to deeply understand (and prioritize against) our internal customer needs through developer surveys, telemetry (“productivity vs. frustration signals”), advisory board meetings, pilot programs, and relationship-building with customer EMs.
• Built AI agents and ran “buy-vs-build” pilot programs to rethink end-to-end mobile/app/web testing, and demonstrate with the opportunity to save hundreds of human hours each week, while reducing the count of severe regressions.
• Designed and implemented company-wide mobile app engineering alerting and on-call process, reducing TTA and TTR for mobile app incidents from days to hours.
• Redesigned and implemented mobile app engineering hiring process to re-focus on problem-solving process and practical skills and experience, improving onboarding time and reducing skills deficits on mobile development teams.

Senior Manager (Trulia and Zillow Offers iOS Team) • Zillow Group

SF Bay Area (Remote) • April 2020 - October 2021

• Led a team of six iOS developers and one SDET.
• Led project team of web+apps+backend developers to migrate Trulia onto a new search platform and listing data pipeline to improve performance and comply with MLS requirements.
  
• Cross-trained mobile app engineers on backend engineering and GraphQL subgraph development and deployment, so that our mobile developers could contribute to “the whole stack,” reducing interdependencies between teams and breaking down knolwedge silos and “developer centrality.”
• Led cross-organizational team evaluating, building, and deploying CICD platform for iOS engineers.
  
• Coached and supported SDEs in successful achievement of career development objectives, including transition from IC to EM, changes in primary discipline, and expansion of scope and influence beyond our team and organizational unit.

Principal iOS Engineer • Zillow Group

San Francisco, CA • October 2015 - April 2020

• Led multi-quarter initiative to refactor iOS monolith into independent reusable modules.
  
• Led phased rewrite of Trulia iOS in Swift, while minimizing risk and impact to product roadmaps.
  
• Led Trulia GraphQL working group to ensure consistency, quality, and performance across the schema and resolvers.
  
• Built and maintained CI/CD infrastructure, test+code coverage dashboards, and crash/error monitors for Trulia iOS team.
  
• Wrote and maintained onboarding tools and documentation for new contributors to Trulia iOS products.

iOS Technical Lead (Consultant) • CNBC

Englewood Cliffs, NJ • February 2015 - September 2015

• Architected and led delivery of several high visibility features within the CNBC iOS apps, including in-app live TV streaming and synchronized watch lists.
  
• Architected, built, and shipped CNBC’s Apple Watch app.
  
• Built in-house CI/CD platform with automated unit tests and code coverage reporting.
  
• Maintenance, debugging, code reviewing of CNBC Android app.

Senior Software Engineer • Shoutlet

Madison, WI • July 2013 - February 2015

• Developed and released native iOS and Android mobile apps that integrate with Shoutlet’s Social CRM platform.
  
• Technical lead for a delivery team, overseeing PHP/JS/CSS architecture, code quality, collaboration with service API teams and product development team.
  
• Built and deployed high availability realtime messaging platform for Shoutlet’s Customer Care offering.

Software Engineer • Time Inc

New York, NY • June 2010 - June 2013

• Built and shipped a suite of iOS apps for brands including Sports Illustrated, Time Magazine, PEOPLE, Real Simple, and more.

Education

BFA • School of Visual Arts New York, NY
Motion Graphics Design Class of 2010

More about me!

I have been involved in the animal shelter/rescue world for over 10 years developing adoption and volunteer programs, building technology solutions, serving as a board member, organizing fundraisers and events, and assisting with shelter dog enrichment and behavior work. I am an active volunteer at Oakland Animal Services in our dog adoption and shelter playgroup programs, and I build and maintain our web applications and data pipelines. I’m proud of the software development work our small team has done to drive more adoptions, reduce shelter animal length of stay, and increase live outcome rates. I’m excited also to be developing AI Use Cases with the City of Oakland, and designing strategically-deployed AI agents to extend the capacity of our incredibly talented and dedicated staff.