Ryan Smith

Ryan Smith is a technology leader with over two decades of experience building and scaling global support, services, and engineering organizations for mission-critical environments. He currently serves as Head of Customer Engineering at CIQ, leading Support, Professional Services, and the Open Source Program Office for enterprise infrastructure used by organizations including NASA, NVIDIA, Google, and Toyota.

Ryan's career spans from hands-on engineering to executive leadership, from early roles at Apple to building globally distributed teams at CloudBees through the company's $1B valuation. A featured speaker at DevOps World and published author on Jenkins performance and JVM optimization, Ryan now focuses on building AI-enabled, human-first engineering organizations that integrate AI into operational workflows while keeping judgment, accountability, and trust firmly human.