Howard Riker

Howard Riker has spent his career at the intersection of software engineering and organizational scale — building the kind of teams and systems that keep working when everything else is on fire.

As Head of Engineering at one of Europe's most-travelled consumer technology platforms, he has led the transition from traditional software delivery into AI-native product development: running internal AI hackathons, embedding LLM capabilities into production workflows, and building the engineering culture required to ship reliably under pressure.

He has managed distributed engineering organizations, driven growth-focused platform architecture, and sat in the on-call rotation long enough to have strong opinions about observability, failure recovery, and the gap between demo-quality AI and production-grade AI.

Reliable by Design distills what he learned the hard way: that every impressive model capability eventually lands in a codebase, a deployment pipeline, and a 2 AM incident — and that the engineers who thrive are the ones who build the shell, not just the kernel.

When he is not thinking about AI reliability, he volunteers teaching computer literacy to older adults — a reminder that the most important user of any system is the one who never asked for it to be complicated.

He is based in Ireland.