Richard is an experienced engineer who has lead/managed teams at startups and big tech companies in social media, advertising, alternative investments, and healthcare. Previously, he was a staff engineer at GIPHY leading the ad products team.

2025 — NowAlchemyStaff Software Engineer

2025 — Now

New York City Metropolitan Area

Platform Infra team - Responsible for OLAP database (Druid) ingesting 30B+ events daily powering observability + external analytics dashboards, internal AI platform, and custom edge proxy handling 100k+ rps globally

2024 — 2025Recurse CenterSabbatical

2024 — 2025

New York City Metropolitan Area

Database internals, transformers, and distributed systems, oh my!

2023 — 2024GIPHYStaff Software Engineer

2023 — 2024

New York City Metropolitan Area

2020 — 2023MetaSoftware Engineer, Technical Lead

2020 — 2023

New York, United States

2019 — 2020GIPHYSenior Software Engineer

2019 — 2020

New York City Metropolitan Area

Technical Lead of Ad Products Team.

GIPHY Inc. is the first and largest GIF search engine where thousands of artists, brands, and pop culture moments make today’s expression, entertainment, and info a little more moving. GIPHY is integrated into thousands of platforms, including iMessage, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Microsoft Teams, Tinder, Slack and WhatsApp. We serve more than 10 billion pieces of content (GIFs, Stickers, etc.) per day, to a daily user reach of 1+ billion.

Education

2014 — 2016

New York University

Master's Degree

2014 — 2016

2010 — 2014

Rutgers University

Bachelor of Science (B.S.)

2010 — 2014

2005 — 2009

The Juilliard School

Piano Performance

2005 — 2009

Experience+

Education

Master's Degree

Bachelor of Science (B.S.)

Piano Performance