Frank Riley
Principal Software Engineer at Theta, LLC
Tucson, Arizona, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolFrank Riley is a Principal Software Engineer with 20+ years of experience building high-performance, low-level systems for defense, real-time DSP, and large-scale backend services from Tucson, AZ. He specializes in back-end engineering—threads, processes, OS integration, garbage collectors, and high-speed data pipelines—and has a track record of rescuing failing projects by redesigning architectures and squeezing orders-of-magnitude performance gains from existing code. At Rincon Research he led modular, event-driven, high-data-rate systems and implemented parallel, vectorized DSP algorithms, a phase-coherent sub-band tuner for 100 MS/s streams, and a 3x faster parallel correlation engine. He is an active open-source contributor to notable projects like Pi-hole FTL and Jellyfin, where he fixed security- and performance-sensitive native code and added a CMake build for reliability. An entrepreneur as well—founder of Theta, LLC and GearHead Software—he blends systems-level engineering with product delivery, from reverse-engineered ECU tuning and real-time firmware to real-time trading web apps. Quietly focused on making other engineers’ code “just work,” he aims to avoid the call that his systems have failed.
11 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
B.S. Computer Science, B.S. Computer Science at Iowa State University
Stackoverflow
150reputation
34kreached
9answers
6questions
Github Skills (27)
back-end-development10
apidoc10
net10
dotnet10
c1110
c1710
asp-net10
api10
dns10
dotnet-core10
backend10
csharp10
cmake9
encoding9
http-server9
Programming languages (16)
Github contributions (5)
jellyfin/jellyfin
May 2015 - May 2020
The Free Software Media System - Server Backend & API
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1 review, 6 commits, 5 PRs in 5 years
Contributions summary:Frank contributed to the Jellyfin backend by fixing bugs, enhancing functionality, and improving code quality. Their commits addressed issues with Swagger parameter types, added support for encoding with libx265, and fixed CORS-related issues. They also refactored and optimized code within the media encoding and HTTP server modules, demonstrating a focus on core server-side logic and API interactions.
cmsdotnetphpcsharpvideo
pi-hole/FTL
May 2020 - Jun 2020
The Pi-hole FTL engine
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:16 commits, 3 PRs, 27 comments in 1 month
Contributions summary:Frank primarily focused on optimizing the FTL engine, specifically within the `dnsmasq_interface.c` and `signals.c` files. Their work involved identifying and fixing buffer overflows, improving blocking mechanisms, and refining the interaction of the engine with the DNS cache. They also added a CMake build system, and removed unnecessary code.
apidnsftlpi-hole-ftlpi-hole
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