About

I'm interested in what makes systems, organisations, and engineering teams succeed or fail; how better design can improve outcomes; and how to preserve reliability and judgement as AI accelerates production.

My perspective combines an early background in politics, philosophy, and economics, a lifelong interest in history, an undergraduate degree in AI, and over a decade of experience across engineering organisations internationally, specialising in distributed systems.

At Segment I owned reliability for the Object Sources pipeline, and later, on the Foundation team — the core event pipeline, delivering zero-downtime migrations across infrastructure processing over 1M events per second.

At Ecobee I led the backend architecture for 24/7 camera recording, redesigning the platform from event-triggered clips to a time-indexed media model — a 70x increase in video volume, and a new video API.

At Cocoon I took an IoT device from prototype to retail release, being primarily responsible for the AI sensing and detection feature — the core product differentiator.

If you would like to discuss collaboration or something I have written, you can reach me at matt@foobarcat.com.