Dustin Riley
Me
about

I'm Dustin.

I’m an engineering manager at Vanta, where I help build teams that experiment, ship, and have fun along the way.

Before that: Elation Health, Automox, and Eli Lilly — mostly new products, strategic pivots, and scaling teams up. This site is where I keep my experiments and the occasional writeup. Below is the long version.

The long version

19 of 19 moments
2026 this year
April 2026 work

Patent application filed: evidence artifacts for unstructured audit requests

Co-filed a USPTO application with a teammate at Vanta. The idea: turn unstructured audit requests into structured workflows by reasoning over a repository of evidence and signals from prior audits. Patent pending.

2025 last year
September 2025 work

Promoted to Senior Engineering Manager at Vanta

Same teams, but the scope grew.

August 2025 side projects

Shipped the college football scorigami visualization

A heatmap of every final score that has ever happened in college football. Wrote about it for the blog.

July 2025 side projects

Built this site in Astro

Wanted something tiny, fast, and easy to build with.

2023 vanta
September 2023 work

Joined Vanta as a Software Engineering Manager

Came in to run the Partner Experiences team. Compliance is a complex problem.

2022
July 2022 work

Joined Elation Health as a Software Engineering Manager

Started mid-pivot toward value-based care as a company. Value-based care is still coming any day now.

2021 columbus
June 2021 personal

Moved to Columbus

Closer to family. The remote-work era made it work.

April 2021 work

Joined Automox as a Software Engineering Manager

Took over a brand-new applications pillar. Two engineers became thirteen, and the broader org went from sixty to two hundred.

2019
December 2019 education

Completed the Purdue cybersecurity program

Twelve weeks of threat modeling, incident response, and trying to break things.

January 2019 work

Tech Lead and Product Owner at Eli Lilly

Android tech lead and product owner for Tempo, Lilly's Class II personalized diabetes management app.

2017 indianapolis
June 2017 work

Joined Eli Lilly as a Tech Lead in Digital Health

First full-time role with a degree. Tech lead on Think. Talk. Treat. Migraine — Lilly's Class I iOS app for improving migraine conversations between patients and their doctors.

May 2017 education

BS in Computer Science, Miami University

Met many of my closest friends here. Was working as a SWE before crossing the stage.

2016
December 2016 education

Became an ICAgile Certified Professional

After enough retrospectives, the certification mostly confirmed what teams had already taught me.

2014
November 2014 work

Founded Riley Media, LLC

Client work alongside my own products. The biggest: a system that scraped breaking financial news, ran sentiment analysis on it, and drove trading decisions off the signal. Earned an offer from a top-ten US startup accelerator for another product.

2013
May 2013 work

First SWE job at Dropoly

Educational and audit apps in the energy sector. Ported an ActionScript codebase to run on Android, then helped rebuild the whole thing in Meteor.js after we pivoted.

2012
September 2012 side projects

YouTube channel hit partnership status

A run of game-dev tutorials. Apparently a lot of other people wanted to learn how to ship a game.

2011
July 2011 side projects

First Android app crossed 100,000 downloads

A lost-phone finder, built after watching a couple fight over a lost one at a party. Pre-dated Find My Phone — turned out other people had the same problem.

2010
April 2010 side projects

Banned from eBay for selling game hacks

Sold PlayStation and Call of Duty hacks until eBay caught on. Early entrepreneurial spirit, slightly misguided execution.

2007
December 2007 side projects

Built my gaming clan a website

First time someone asked me to build something for them. A crappy phpBB install on free hosting. Felt like magic anyway.