Riley Scott Jacob

Systems Engineer

Midsize manufacturer

• Sole engineer responsible for the company's entire IT environment and OT network, having modernized it from a flat legacy network.
• Architect and maintain a 3-node Proxmox/Ceph hyperconverged cluster (~25 VMs and containers), identity and PKI, and a segmented network of 200+ devices, from workstations and servers to cameras, printers, PLCs, and press HMIs.
• Designed and built ~10 production applications (Python/Flask/FastAPI, C++/Qt) used daily across manufacturing operations: machine and press monitoring, operational dashboards, barcode scanning and labeling, CAD search, and single sign-on.
• Built an HRIS and timeclock platform end to end, including custom kiosk hardware with NFC-based multi-factor authentication.
• Own security architecture and operations: access control, endpoint detection, incident response, vulnerability management, risk assessment, and governance toward ISO 27001 / CMMC.

Virtualization Intern, then Contractor

American Axle & Manufacturing

• Designed and built a MATLAB tool implementing an algorithm to simulate a destructive testing procedure; continued as a contractor through the fall to complete it.
• The tool was put into production and, by later report, remains in use.

CVE-2026-44171

MariaDB

• Discovered a path-traversal vulnerability in MariaDB's mbstream backup utility (CVSS 6.3). Disclosed through HackerOne via coordinated disclosure, and written up in detail.

• Maxwell, an interactive electrodynamics textbook: eight chapters from waves to antennas, each backed by a real-time 2D finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) simulation in the browser. (Earlier version: a GPU-accelerated solver in C / OpenCL / OpenGL.)
• QED Feynman Diagram Explorer, an interactive tool for visualizing scattering processes, Feynman diagrams, and their topologies.
• Holographic Grating Machine, a two-beam interference system for recording 1200 lines/mm diffraction gratings on photoresist; part of a path toward Rydberg-atom electrometry.

Laboratory Teaching Assistant, AEP 1200

Applied & Engineering Physics intro lab, Cornell University

• Ran lab sections and mentored students through an introductory experimental-physics course.
• Demonstrated SEM imaging of individual carbon nanotubes by first locating them with an AFM, a measurement the lab had considered impractical.

President (2019–2020), Cornell Astronomy Society

Cornell University

• Led the society and its weekly public-outreach program at Fuertes Observatory: Friday-night public lectures on the night sky, telescope viewing, and Q&A for the community.

• riscj.dev, long-form technical writing on physics, security, and the history of science, including faithful reproductions of original research papers.
• Physics Stack Exchange, author of widely-read explanations across quantum mechanics, electrodynamics, condensed matter, and field theory.

B.A. Physics

Cornell University

Coursework in electrodynamics, quantum mechanics, statistical mechanics, and particle physics.