I build the data platforms behind power-market trading — trillion-row Snowflake warehouses, AWS pipelines, and power-flow simulations that run across auto-scaling fleets.
Appian Way Energy Partners · Durham, North Carolina · 20+ years in
Hover or tab through a role to see what I was building with at the time.
I lead the technology function for a financial transmission rights (FTR) trading firm active across six ISO/RTO electricity markets — PJM, MISO, ERCOT, CAISO, SPP, and NYISO. That means owning the cloud infrastructure end to end, running a Snowflake platform at trillion-row scale (clustering strategy, cost, query performance for shift factors and other power-systems sensitivity data), and orchestrating PowerWorld Simulator across auto-scaling Windows compute fleets from Python.
I still write a lot of Python and SQL. Leading a team and staying hands-on aren't in tension for me; the second is what keeps the first honest.
AWS put an architecture I designed on stage at re:Invent 2018 — Step Functions, Batch, Lambda, Aurora Serverless, and SNS parsing thousands of files in parallel. Watch the talk.
Software engineering roles building enterprise Java applications.
Benjamin Franklin Scholar, Order of 30 & 3, founding member of the University Honors Program, University Scholars Program. Also pursued Environmental Engineering and Philosophy — which explains a lot.
The pattern across all of it: take a pile of data that's too big for the current tools, and build the thing that makes it routine.
I advise on data-platform architecture, performance, and cost — the same problems I solve at trillion-row scale in my day job. Typical engagements:
I also still take the occasional hourly web project — site builds, tweaks, and SEO — if that's what you need.
z@charyriesland.com
Yes, that address works — it's "Zachary Riesland" split at the Z.
LinkedIn · Photography on Flickr
Research Triangle, North Carolina. Email is the fastest way to reach me.
