A natural at the craft: Getting to know Andrew Rissing

 

Some people find their calling. Andrew Rissing built one, first on a calculator.

Long before he was a senior staff engineer at WellSky, Andrew got his first taste of programming on a TI-81 in middle school. It was a curiosity more than anything, until a high school QBasic course made something click. While his classmates spent their final project on animations and sound effects, Andrew built a crude CAD program from scratch, one that let users save their designs to disk and reload them later. It was a small thing, but it revealed something important: he did not just understand how to write code; he understood why it should exist.

That instinct carried him through a computer engineering and mathematics degree at SMU, and then across an unusually broad set of industries. He has written software in defense at Raytheon, in medical devices at St. Jude Medical, and in financial technology at Alkami – each sector with its own stakes, constraints, and culture. At WellSky, he leads Team Monarch and provides architectural support across patient care, drawing on every chapter of that varied career to shape how the work gets done.

Outside of work, Andrew lives in McKinney, Texas, a suburb north of Dallas, with a life that reflects the same mix of discipline and curiosity he brings to engineering.

Three years ago, his son earned his first-degree black belt in karate. Watching him complete the journey lit something in Andrew – part admiration, part motivation to get moving himself. He joined the dojo, and today holds a first-degree black belt of his own. His son, naturally, has already reached second degree. The gap, Andrew is quick to note, is still very much there.

Photography has been a constant since high school, though it has taken on new dimensions over the years. When his first child was born, he invested in a proper digital camera to document those early years. Through his local church, he has photographed monthly baptisms, painstakingly restored old family photos, and helped small business owners build out product portfolios. These days he gravitates toward macrophotography, finding something satisfying in the discipline of getting close and seeing the world at a different scale.  

Travel, for Andrew, follows a philosophy that feels almost counter-cultural for someone who works in systems and structure. He and his family arrive with a list of things they would like to do and let the days unfold from there. No rigid itinerary to follow, which, to him, is a reminder that not everything needs to be architected in advance.

What keeps Andrew energized at WellSky, he says, is simpler than you might expect: everyone is on the same team, with the common goal of serving our partners. In a role that takes him across multiple groups and departments every day, that shared orientation matters.

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