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

👋 Hello! I’m a tech lead manager specializing in AI engineering platforms and infrastructure. My passion is helping enterprises achieve ROI from their AI investments through better harness engineering, tool and context assembly, safe and secure agent identity/authorization, and fast/reliable sandbox environments.

Senior Manager (Agentic Engineering Platform) • Zillow Group

SF Bay Area (Remote) • December 2025 - Present

• Founded new agentic engineering platform team within the Developer Experience organization.
• Reimagined our internal developer portal (catalog of apps, services, teams, networks, etc) as a platform that any team can build upon. Led the team through a microfrontend rearchitecture, and introduced CLI and MCP “front doors” to complement the existing web-based UI.
• Led the team through development of an internal cloud agent platform composed of agent primitives such as models/gateways, sandboxes, skills, tools, triggers, and integrations into existing workflows to “meet people where they are” and enable them to connect agents to automate work that was not possible to automate before LLMs.
• Led the team through launch of an internal MCP gateway that provides harnesses a single MCP connection to all enterprise MCP servers. The MCP gateway successfully abstracted away complexity and fragmentation of OAuth support across a variety of internal and external tools, and provided employees with an easy way to configure the tools their agents need to do real work reliably.
• led the team through scaling an internally built SRE agent from a side project to a central part of every alert and incident response. The agent now self-improves through online evaluations and identifies the root cause of most alerts before a human even receives the page.
• Launched a “Skills Marketplace” in our internal developer portal, providing a trustworthy place to share, discover, install, and update agent skills. Integrated into top-used harnesses so skills were searchable from anywhere with no setup required, and added vulnerability and correctness gates in the publish workflow.
• Built proof-of-concepts to influence team product roadmap, such as:
  • Realtime “smart model routing” based on task classification with in-harness human feedback on routing decisions
  • Dynamic security policy engine for agent tool calling, handoffs, and “hops” between authorization servers.
  • Safe PR “auto-merge” based on risk scores calculated from traditional checks such as dependency analysis/“blast radius” and size/complexity, as well as LLM-based checks such as intent and customer impact.

Senior Manager (Mobile Apps Platform) • Zillow Group

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

• Founded 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 VM-based CI/CD infrastructure (powering all iOS CI workloads) as well as our Android container-based 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, cost-efficient, 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 to rethink end-to-end mobile/app/web testing, and demonstrated 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 knowledge 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 a multi-quarter initiative to refactor iOS monolith into independent reusable modules.
  
• Led the phased rewrite of Trulia iOS in Swift, while minimizing risk and impact to product roadmaps.
  
• Led the 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

• Architected, developed and released native iOS and Android apps from zero-to-one. These apps were mobile clients for 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’m proud of the apps, services, and data pipelines I’ve been able to build to help teams drive more adoptions, reduce shelter animal length of stay, and increase live outcome rates. I’m currently working on a new product for animal shelter work that leverages agents to extend the capacity and impact of our tiny-but-mighty human team.