Independent software engineering consultancy
Software engineering for modern products and systems.
Rief Productions is an independent software engineering consultancy founded by Andrew Riefenstahl. We design and build full-stack applications, backend systems and APIs, AI-enabled workflows, automation, and the cloud infrastructure that runs them.
Available for contract and consulting engagements.
Capabilities
What we build
The engineering problems we take on most often.
- Full-stack web applications
- Internal platforms and dashboards
- Customer-facing products and portals
- Modern frontend architecture
- Design-system and component foundations
- APIs and service design
- Authentication and authorization
- Integrations and third-party services
- Data workflows and background processing
- Event-driven systems
- Databases, caching, and search
- Cloud infrastructure
- LLM applications
- Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)
- AI agents and orchestration
- Workflow automation
- MCP and tool integrations
- Structured data pipelines
- Developer productivity tooling
- Technical planning and system design
- Migrations and legacy modernization
- Performance and reliability
- Security and accessibility
- Developer experience and tooling
Selected work
Systems we have shipped
A sample of production platforms, backend systems, and open-source tooling.
Fetch.ai / Flockx
AI agent workflow platform
LangGraph agent orchestration and RAG-powered chat over WebSocket on an AI agent platform.
- AI agents
- RAG
- Backend
- APIs
- AWS
Whole Earth Curriculum
Open-source K–12 curriculum
An open-source K–12 curriculum generated by an agent loop across nearly two billion tokens.
- AI agents
- Automation
- Open source
- Astro
ISCPO.org
Membership platform & editorial system
A WordPress membership platform re-architected for reproducible environments and lower config drift.
- Architecture
- WordPress
- Membership
- CI/CD
Propane.com
Enterprise website
Enterprise web property with Okta 2FA, Algolia search, HubSpot CRM, and an automated release pipeline.
- Enterprise
- Auth
- Search
- CI/CD
- Integrations
ABowlofRed.com
Nonprofit charity platform
Charity site with Stripe ticketing, migrated from Gatsby to Astro for performance and developer experience.
- Payments
- Migration
- Performance
- CMS
MCP Server Suite
Open-source AI tooling
Safety-first MCP servers giving AI assistants governed, read-only access to real systems.
- AI tooling
- MCP
- Databases
- Security
- Open source
How we work
Senior ownership, pragmatic execution
End-to-end ownership
From requirements and architecture through implementation, deployment, and operations.
Requirements into systems
Translating business needs into data models, interfaces, and services.
Pragmatic architecture
The right amount of structure for the problem — no over-engineering, no shortcuts that become outages.
Built to maintain
Readable code, clear boundaries, and documentation the next engineer can follow.
Performance and reliability
Fast interfaces, sensible caching, and systems that fail gracefully.
Effective with existing teams
Comfortable working inside an established codebase, process, and team — not just greenfield projects.
Technology
What we build with
Tools we have used on shipped projects.
Languages
- TypeScript
- JavaScript
- Python
- SQL
- PHP
- Go
Frontend
- React
- Next.js
- Astro
- Tailwind CSS
- Vite
- TanStack Router
Backend & data
- Node.js
- FastAPI
- Django
- PostgreSQL
- Redis
- Elasticsearch
- MySQL
AI & agents
- LangGraph
- LangChain
- RAG
- MCP
- Agents
- DeepSeek
Infrastructure
- AWS
- Terraform
- AWS CDK
- Docker
- GitHub Actions
- Netlify
- Railway
Integrations
- Stripe
- Auth0 / Okta
- Clerk
- Algolia
- HubSpot
- Headless CMS
About
Rief Productions
We work directly with teams as contract engineers, technical consultants, or embedded senior contributors.
Rief Productions has delivered production software for enterprises, nonprofits, and an AI agent platform, and its founder co-founded a worker-owned technology cooperative.
Highlights
- Senior full-stack engineering
- Backend & API architecture
- AI applications and agents
- Cloud infrastructure
- Performance & reliability
- Technical leadership
Start a conversation
Tell us what you are working on and we will tell you whether and how we can help.
Good reasons to reach out
- Contract or consulting engineering
- Application or system architecture
- Backend, API, or integrations work
- AI and automation projects
- Modernizing or migrating a legacy system
- Technical review or due diligence