About

I’m Matthew Ault. I work at the intersection of cognition, systems, and engineering — explaining the behaviour of complex systems whether they be technical, organisational or behavioural — through first-principles models and the application of systems thinking.

My background is in distributed systems, ingestion pipelines, and real-time media platforms. At Segment I built and debugged large-scale data pipelines in a high-agency engineering culture, shaping how I think about incentives, structure, and emergent behaviour.

I’m particularly interested in how system architecture explains outcomes. How incentives, feedback loops, and constraint shape behaviour, and how success and failure are often downstream of design.

This site collects my longer-form writing, projects and consulting offering.