Borja García de los Ríos
Technology Program & Portfolio Leader
● Hillsboro, OR · US + EU work-authorized
About me

Borja García
de los Ríos

I turn complex technology into outcomes people can feel, and the teams who build it into people who grow.

Most recently I spent a decade at Nike, where I owned a 30+ solution, $30M+ technology portfolio across retail, finance, and digital employee experience, partnering with senior leaders on roadmap, prioritization, and the hard trade-offs. I led an enterprise GenAI deployment across five teams for contract automation, projected to save eight figures a year, and consolidation work that saved seven figures annually.

I got here by building things. I started out making websites in the web's early days, ran Trust & Safety projects at eBay in Spain, where sharper use of seller ratings and predictive models improved fraud metrics 30%, and spent years in pharma digital: Agency-side at Quodem delivering for Pfizer and GSK, then at Roche, where I wrote the business case for a new mobility service that shipped ten internal apps in its first year and grew a four-country account book 150%. Along the way, a stint running ethnographic research programs at Pinpoint in Portland.

These days the hands-on thread is AI. I design, build, and operate production LLM products end to end, solo, and I publish original research on what frontier models can and can't do, starting with Program Sensing, an evaluation of whether AI can decide what deserves leadership attention in a complex portfolio.

What drives me isn't the org chart. It's the makers behind the work, the people who take a dream from their head and ship it. My job is to point them at what matters most, protect their time, and make the whole sprawling portfolio legible to the leaders who depend on it.

NIKEeBayRochePinpointQuodem
How I work

Start with impact, not activity. Thirty-plus solutions don't all matter equally. My job is knowing which five do this quarter, and protecting my teams' time for them.

Lead the people, not the plan. I grow TPMs, engineers, and testers, connect them to work that stretches them, and then get out of the way.

Make the portfolio legible. Leaders shouldn't dig for status. I build the visibility that turns 30 workstreams into clear decisions, with prioritization 20% faster.

Bet on the new thing early. The GenAI rollout started as a hunch about where contract work was headed. It shipped with projected annual savings in the eight figures.

Read the full approach
Also building

Production AI products

LLM products designed, shipped, and operated end to end, solo: Auth, payments, retrieval, streaming generation, guardrails, analytics, monitoring. Live, and run like a portfolio, with data-driven bets and honest kill decisions.

Program Sensing

An original LLM evaluation: Frontier models vs an expert human baseline on portfolio judgment. Now recruiting experienced program leaders.

IN THE FIELD
Ways I can help

If you're hiring for a senior technology program, portfolio, or AI-delivery role

I'm interviewing now: US + EU work-authorized, no sponsorship needed, open to international moves. Email me and I'll respond quickly.

If you're working out whether AI can carry a real operational workflow

I take on a small number of paid advisory engagements on LLM evaluation: Designing evals grounded in the actual job, building the harness, and reading the results honestly. Program Sensing is the reference for how I approach it.

If you're a program leader with questions about any of this

Ask. I answer email, whether it's portfolio operating models, GenAI deployment, or making the jump to hands-on AI building.