Hey, I'm
I build infrastructure that doesn't fall over, grapple people who try to choke me, and launch things into the sky for fun.
Site Reliability Engineer with a passion for enabling teams to move quickly at any scale.
I've spent nearly two decades building, scaling, and keeping infrastructure alive — from bare metal clusters handling hundreds of thousands of transactions per second to cloud-native platforms serving millions of users globally. Currently keeping things running at FloSports.
When I'm not wrangling infrastructure, I'm either on the mats at Appalachian Grapplers — the BJJ school my wife Rachael and I co-founded — or in the shop building rocket motor dynamometers and flight computers. I like things that go fast and don't break. Whether that's a deployment pipeline or a mid-power rocket.
20 years building systems that scale
Co-founder, Appalachian Grapplers
Motor dynos & flight electronics
Keeping the lights on for a sports streaming platform that serves live events to passionate fans worldwide.
Founding team member. Built the entire infrastructure from scratch and scaled it through millions of users across 8 countries, handling hundreds of millions of dollars in transactions.
Joined via the Webmail.us acquisition — one of the largest email hosting platforms in the world. Managed 100+ bare-metal systems handling hundreds of thousands of transactions per second with 5-9s uptime. Led redesign and migration of the Linux/MySQL database cluster.
Managed a team overseeing 150+ Solaris UNIX and Red Hat Linux servers dedicated to serving the Army Acquisition Corps.
ESP-32 based rocket motor dynamometer. Measures thrust curves, total impulse, and specific impulse with pyrotechnic ignition, countdown sequence, and SD card data logging.
A simple REST-based email service. Like Amazon SES, but yours.
Builds a Word Game application in AWS VPC via Terraform and Ansible. A clean IaC reference implementation.
Ruby gem for the Redline13 load testing API. Because load testing shouldn't be painful.
Co-Founder · Mt. Airy, NC
In 2024, my wife Rachael and I founded Appalachian Grapplers — a non-profit BJJ club built on a simple idea: great training shouldn't come with contracts, unnecessary rituals, or a second mortgage.
We're NoGi focused with wrestling and judo influences, and we believe in an old-school approach: submissions over scoring points. We've grown to 50+ active members with 5 sessions per week, all volunteer-run, with every dollar going back into the club.
Photos coming soon
Photos coming soon
Some people have hobbies. I have a workshop full of force sensors, pyrotechnic igniters, and things that produce thrust.
My rocket WristLOC earned me both my L1 and L2 high-power rocketry certifications on the same day — wasn't even planning on L2 but lucked into some larger motor hardware at the launch. Next up is L3, which means building an absolute monster.
On the engineering side, I designed and built ThrustMaster — an ESP-32 based rocket motor dynamometer that measures thrust curves, total impulse, and specific impulse. It features pyrotechnic ignition with a countdown sequence, real-time force measurement via an HX711 load cell amplifier, and SD card data logging for post-burn analysis.
I've also worked with AltiDuo32 (dual deployment altimeter) and Open-Altimeter (Arduino-based deployment for mid-power rockets). The intersection of embedded systems, pyrotechnics, and data analysis? That's my kind of weekend.
Watch the Launch"As a founding team-member at Tilt, Matt was immediately busy with building out our infrastructure from scratch and scaling it through millions of users — always moving fast in the highly-regulated payments space. He is the type of team-member you really cherish working with because he was always 10-steps ahead, asking himself the questions that no one else would even consider asking for a few months, and usually having the right answer already implemented way before anyone asked."
"I consider Matt an expert at AWS, site reliability engineering, and linux systems. He is passionate about learning new things and is an incredibly hard worker. I believe he could help out almost any company trying to automate, scale, and manage their Cloud Infrastructure."
"Matt is able to quickly ramp up on new technologies, and discern what's a fad from what will add true, lasting value to the problem at hand. You quickly learn that you can throw any new challenge Matt's way, and he will rise to, and even exceed expectations, learning whatever is necessary along the way."
Whether it's about infrastructure, jiu-jitsu, or rocketry — I'm always up for a conversation.