Systems engineering — Thurmont, Maryland
We build the integrations, automations, and internal tools a business runs on — the kind that keep working when nobody is watching them, and that say something out loud when they don’t.
| Job | Last run | Records | State |
|---|---|---|---|
| orders-sync | 04:00:02 | 1,284 | OK |
| invoice-generate | 06:15:00 | 312 | OK |
| inventory-recon | 03:30:11 | 8,940 | OK |
| crm-webhook | live | — | OK |
What actually breaks
Failure 01
It stops on a Tuesday. Nobody notices until the month-end numbers don't reconcile and someone spends a weekend on it.
What we do
Success and failure both get reported, to a person, by name. Alerts route to the human who can fix it — not to a dashboard nobody has open.
Failure 02
Sometimes that person is a contractor who has moved on. Sometimes they're still there and can't take a vacation.
What we do
A runbook, an architecture note, and a recorded handover. Written for the engineer you hire next, not for us.
Failure 03
A vendor ships a breaking change, records start failing validation, and the ones that failed are simply gone.
What we do
Versioned clients, contract tests, and a dead-letter queue. Bad records wait in a place you can see and replay them, instead of disappearing.
A real one
Not a diagram of nothing. This is the shape of most integrations we ship: a receiver that never blocks, a queue that absorbs the vendor’s bad afternoon, a worker that retries with backoff, and somewhere for the records that still won’t go through.
Selected work
Details on request
01
Development on federal recreation booking software — the system Americans use to reserve campsites and permits on public land. High-volume public traffic and the kind of scrutiny where an outage is a news item rather than a ticket.
02
Technical owner as CTO: microservices in Next.js and Node.js, containerised with Docker and run on ECS, with the CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure automation, and observability that keep a revenue-carrying system honest.
03
A community deals platform for local merchants: offers published by the business, redeemed by QR code at the counter, with Stripe and PayPal subscriptions behind them. Reconcile jobs keep memberships and verifications agreeing with what was actually paid for, and an idempotent migration runner ships schema changes to production without a maintenance window. Live with 100+ merchants and 200+ locals.
What we build
Four things, done properly. If you need something else, we’ll tell you and point you somewhere better.
| Service | Description | Typical duration |
|---|---|---|
| API & platform integrations | Two systems that were never meant to talk to each other, made to agree — without a person re-keying data in between. | 3–8 weeks |
| Internal tools & dashboards | The screen your ops team actually needs, instead of the spreadsheet three people email around and one person understands. | 4–12 weeks |
| Workflow automation | Scheduled jobs, alerts and hand-offs that run whether or not anyone remembers to run them. | 2–6 weeks |
| Architecture review | A second senior opinion before you commit — on a build-versus-buy call, a migration, or a hire you're about to make. | 1–2 weeks |
Who writes the code
Fifteen years designing, building and operating cloud platforms that other people’s businesses depend on. Currently the technical owner of Eyeglasses.com — microservices in Next.js, Node.js, Docker and ECS on AWS.
Before that: enterprise and government software, including Recreation.gov, and high-volume operational systems where an outage is a public event.
If you hire Riverton, this is who you get on the call and who writes the code.
LinkedIn ↗Thirty minutes, no charge. We’ll look at what you have, say plainly whether this is worth building, and if it isn’t, tell you what we’d do instead.
