Rick Branson
Member Of Technical Staff at OpenAI
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
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RockstarRick Branson is a seasoned engineering leader with 17 years building high-scale distributed systems, currently a Member of Technical Staff at OpenAI focused on online data infrastructure. He has led systems and platform teams at PlanetScale and Twilio Segment, owning petabyte-scale storage, 5-9s query serving, and orchestration for tens of thousands of production databases that support over $100B in revenue. As an early backend engineer and employee #13 at Instagram, he helped multiply performance and scale for video and real-time messaging, a formative experience he still cites. Rick moves between hands-on system design and strategic leadership—driving cloud efficiency, model-serving stacks, and ML-ops at startups like HealthLeap AI—bringing rare depth across storage, real-time pipelines, and inference infrastructure. Based in San Francisco, he combines startup grit with enterprise reliability, often tackling the hardest parts of scaling data platforms rather than surface features.
16 years of coding experience
23 years of employment as a software developer
Github Skills (148)
uuid-generator10
python10
http10
nanoid10
uuid10
foreign10
sortable10
clustering10
gunicorn10
linux10
wsgi10
unicorn10
golang10
ids10
httpd10
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
rbranson/docker-qbittorrentvpn
Dec 2021 - Feb 2025
Docker container which runs a qBittorent-nox client with an optional WireGuard or OpenVPN connection
Contributions:12 pushes in 3 years 3 months
qbittorentvpnnoxdockerwireguard
rbranson/kombu-multibroker
Jul 2012 - Feb 2013
Contributions:12 commits in 7 months
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