# Matthew Brooks > back on the block Location: San Francisco Bay Area, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/matthewbrooks1 Long-time generalist with deep expertise in payments. I design, build, and operate extremely large scale and highly available distributed systems. I lead teams to success and I help others grow their skills. ## Work Experience ### Staff Software Engineer @ Block Jan 2021 – Present | San Francisco Bay Area Building the platform services that power the fourth largest debit card program in the US, Cash App's Cash Card. ### Senior Software Engineer @ Rakuten AdRoll Jan 2019 – Jan 2021 | Tokyo, Japan Led planning and development of a turn-key solution for Rakuten Travel’s advertising team to scale their operations. Established engineering practices and tooling to form a culture of professional and enjoyable software development. Planned, designed, and lead development of system architecture to manage complex integrations and sprawling business requirements with respect to a resource-scarce and small team. ### Senior Software Engineer @ Instacart Jan 2018 – Jan 2019 | San Francisco Bay Area Built the retail partner platform, delivering key features and insights for Instacart's retailer partners to run and grow their business, and which served as a major theme of Instacart's S-1 filing. Re-captured a quarter million in lost ad revenue, monthly, by redesigning and implementing the eventing and data ingestion architecture for ad events at scale. ### Senior Software Engineer @ OpenTable Jan 2018 – Jan 2018 | San Francisco Bay Area Led development for a variety of features on the restaurant platform, contributed to cross-team standards and practices, and focused on fostering adoption of new patterns and technologies to enable better code-sharing across teams and improve the quality of features we shipped. Built a library of components and worked not only to deliver value to our customers but also reduce friction in developer experience on my team. ### Software Engineer @ OpenTable Jan 2016 – Jan 2018 | San Francisco Bay Area I have thrived on a team where my work is at the intersection of many different systems, and where critical features for OpenTable's long term strategy meet the complexity of distributed systems, legacy products, and new iterations. From day one I lead my team in adopting tools and practices that have been accepted as best-in-class in the Javascript community. Still facing the challenges of developing in AngularJS, I submitted a proof-of-concept in React that integrated with our existing infrastructure. From that POC, we became the first team to begin building our frontends in React on our cloud-based enterprise product for restaurants. Not only was I able to bring our CI deployments down from 15+ minutes to four minutes by simplifying our toolchain, but our team was able to deliver three new features in the same time it previously took us to deliver one. I have delivered a number of different features ranging from user account management tools, which has required deep dives into legacy products and systems design, to integrating a third-party payment processor with our billing systems, which brought a better experience to our restaurant customers and additional automation to our internal systems. I also build components that not only enable my team to be more productive but also support other teams both for customer-facing products and internal tools. I regularly engage with our broader engineering organization around UI development, and I participate in efforts to encourage adopting React and other modern tools for building UIs. ### Hacker in Residence @ Hack Reactor Jan 2015 – Jan 2016 I provided mentorship to current students, working with them on JavaScript fundamentals, advanced concepts, frameworks, and design decisions. I also worked with students to reinforce best practices for debugging. I conducted technical interviews for applicants to assess their skills and aptitude. For applicants who were required to complete a project, I reviewed those projects, looking for a demonstrated understanding of key concepts. ### Client Services Manager @ Divergent Language Solutions Jan 2013 – Jan 2014 | San Francisco Onboarded Smartling platform, allowing company to take on new clients for website localization. Managed all client relationships and internal coordination between teams during project lifetimes. ### Senior Project Manager @ Geotext Translations Jan 2012 – Jan 2013 | San Francisco Processed $50k worth of jobs weekly for some of the largest international litigation worldwide. Demonstrated strong leadership skills resulting in an early promotion to senior project manager. ## Education ### Full-Stack Javascript Web Development Hack Reactor ### Bachelor's Degree in Fine and Studio Arts UC San Diego ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/matthewdeanbrooks --- Source: https://flows.cv/matthewbrooks1 JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/matthewbrooks1/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-12