Product-partnerships operator with 15+ years sourcing, negotiating, and shipping product and technology partnerships end-to-end across payments and commerce. Now I orchestrate AI products — researching the friction, designing the agent, and pressure-testing it before a real user is at risk.
About
I'm Calvin Riley — a product-partnerships operator with 15+ years leading complex product and technology partnerships end-to-end at commerce and payments companies. I source, evaluate, negotiate, and secure partnerships aligned with company priorities, structure agreements that balance partner needs with product objectives, and own the integration experience all the way through measured adoption. I'm trusted across C-suite, product, engineering, finance, and legal — the connective tissue that gets cross-functional deals done.
I now turn that operator's instinct toward building AI products. As an MBA candidate in Applied AI at Northwest University, I research the friction, decompose the workflow, design the agent, and validate it with synthetic personas and real testers before shipping. I move fast, pressure-test ideas against real-world viability, and care more about shipping something that works than sounding impressive. The portfolio below is the proof of work.
Selected AI work
Founder · Product & AI orchestration · 2026
A deployed AI agent that meets high-functioning, "successful-but-empty" professionals where they are, runs a clinically-informed discovery conversation, and surfaces the belief patterns driving their discontent. Built on Claude with a clinical-psychologist co-founder's framework, validated with synthetic personas and human testers, and engineered with deterministic safety guardrails. 4/4 patterns classified correctly · 0 false negatives on crisis signals.
Read the full case study → Case studyFounder · Orchestrator & Payments Agent
A multi-agent AI system that gives a single landlord the operating capacity of a full property-management company. I lead the team and own the Payments Agent, with Fair Housing stewardship designed in.
Read the full case study → Case studyBuilder & Product Owner · Sales intelligence
An agentic sales-intelligence engine I built for my Equinox Payments team — it validates real product-fit, then scores every prospect by ecosystem leverage across the payments supply chain.
Read the full case study →Experience
Director of Sales · Product Partnerships & Channel
Lead product and technology partnerships across North American enterprise merchants, software companies, and resellers — owning strategy, sourcing, deal leadership, and the integration experience for the Voyager platform, Luxe terminal line, and HUB estate-management suite.
Independent Sales Organization (ISO) · Owner-Operator Concurrent
Own and operate an independent commerce book — originating and managing accounts including Canadian and cross-border merchants, with POS and software integrations and direct rate and commercial-term negotiation.
Strategic Partnerships Director
Owned the full product-partnerships lifecycle — sourcing, evaluation, negotiation, structuring, integration, and adoption — across software companies, merchants, and the broader commerce ecosystem.
Senior Account Executive · National Sales Director
Nearly nine years at a high-growth payments and commerce company, building and leading product partnerships and channel programs while consistently exceeding quota.
Key competencies
Education & ventures
Northwest University · In Progress
Focused on researching and building applied-AI strategy — the academic backbone behind the portfolio work.
San Francisco State University
A media-and-business foundation that still shows up in how I communicate, position, and tell a product's story.
Daily operator across LLM-based agents, agentic workflows, and automation frameworks as operational tools — API integrations, prompt engineering, and AI-human collaboration patterns.
Co-founding The Meridian, a faith-based life-alignment platform, and building AI-powered business tools that turn emerging technology into working products.
Beyond work
20+ years as a DJ and creative director — from Santa Barbara residencies to festivals and a San Francisco radio show. Still performing the occasional set to stay close to the craft.
Husband and father of two. I serve on the sound / AV team at Calvary Community Church in Sumner, WA, and my wife volunteers in the church's Children's Center — giving back where we live matters to us. Weekends are baseball fields, PNW trails, and good tacos with the kids.