Ryan Lopopolo (he/him)

I am a software engineer with a passion for building resilient, scalable systems. I am a deep generalist with a bias toward backend services and infrastructure.

I work at OpenAI, where I am helping build the Seattle office and OpenAI Frontier. My work centers on harness engineering for agent-driven software: the context, tools, permissions, evals, observability, orchestration, and feedback loops that let AI agents do reliable work in enterprise contexts. Previously, I was a tech lead at Snowflake building the data marketplace and a group tech lead for developer productivity at Brex, where I led a team of 40 and supported a 350-person engineering organization. I also worked at Stripe as a tech lead across infrastructure and product as the company grew from 600 to 6,000 employees. I started my career at Box and Citadel.

At OpenAI, I researched what it means to use agents for software development at scale. That work became Harness Engineering and my public talks on agent-driven development workflows, including using Codex as an execution layer for real software work.

My first love is the Ruby programming language. I am very productive in Rust, Python, and TypeScript. I am lucky enough to have used all of these tools professionally and I use all of them while building Artichoke Ruby, an alternative Ruby implementation written in Rust. 💎 🦀 🐍

I am a foodie 😋 and am always hooked up to Spotify 🎧. I enjoy hiking and snowshoeing in the Pacific Northwest 🏔️, strength training 💪, and working in my garden 🌱. I run a production observability stack at home to support my home automation infrastructure 🧑‍💻.