# Matthew Olson > Engineering Leader | Scalable Solutions from Seed to IPO Location: San Francisco Bay Area, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/matthewolson With over 20 years of experience in software engineering, architecture, entrepreneurship, and leadership, I’ve both built zero-to-one products at early stage startups and spearheaded transformative technical initiatives at high-growth private and public companies. I believe in pragmatic, forward-thinking leadership that delivers immediate value while constantly pushing the boundaries of emerging technologies. I believe the best technical leaders remain hands-on, guiding teams toward innovation while aligning technology with business strategy. I thrive when mentoring high-performing teams and delivering scalable, robust solutions that drive growth at every stage of a company’s journey. Key expertise: • Software Architecture & Engineering • Technical Leadership & Organizational Alignment • Communication and Collaboration • Navigating Ambiguity and Reducing Complexity • Languages: Ruby, Python, Go, Java, Scala, JavaScript, TypeScript, PHP, C++, HTML, CSS • Frameworks: Ruby on Rails, Django, Node.js, Express, React, Remix • Microservices, Distributed Systems & Cloud Platforms: GCP, AWS, Nomad, linkerd • API Design: REST, gRPC, Protocol Buffers • Database Schema Design: SQL, MySQL, PostgreSQL • Performance & Scalability: Instrumentation, Monitoring, Prometheus, Grafana, SLI, SLO, SLA • Distributed Tracing: OpenTelemetry • Infrastructure & DevOps: Linux, Docker, Puppet, Terraform, CI/CD ## Work Experience ### Software Engineer @ WorkOS Jan 2025 – Present | San Francisco, California, United States Helping scale infrastructure and software engineering teams ### Founder & CTO @ Snowpack Jan 2023 – Jan 2025 | San Francisco Bay Area Founded a startup focused on personal finance management with an emphasis on user data ownership and privacy. • Developed a scalable, decoupled frontend built in Remix (React and TypeScript) using Cloudflare Workers, leveraging intelligent data invalidation and smart caching for a near instant user experience. • Built the backend in Go on Google Cloud Platform, using Cloud Run and Cloud SQL (managed PostgreSQL) to ensure scalable, cost-effective API performance, leveraging gRPC and Protobuf for high-performance and typesafe communication. • Integrated Temporal for fault-tolerant data synchronization, effectively managing challenges with third-party API reliability. • Implemented continuous integration and deployment system using Github Actions and Cloud Build. • Grew an organic waitlist of approximately 4,000 users. ### Senior Staff Software Engineer @ BigCommerce Jan 2019 – Jan 2023 | San Francisco Platform Team (January 2019 – September 2021): • Spearheaded the adoption of a microservice architecture, decomposing the previous PHP monolith using containerization and gRPC communication, and introduced and trained the team on distributed tracing (Lightstep/OpenTelemetry), enabling efficient coordination, instrumentation, and monitoring of polyglot services. • Contributed to the development of core libraries for each of our five supported languages that enhanced resiliency with robust network error handling, logging, and instrumentation. • Contributed to the successful deployment of a service mesh for advanced traffic splitting and blue-green deployments. Performance Enablement Team (September 2021 – January 2023): • Founded and led the Performance Enablement Team, fostering a culture of continuous optimization by identifying performance issues, collaborating on solutions, and defining service level objectives and agreements. • Established and evangelized best practices for performance monitoring, logging, instrumentation, and distributed tracing across the microservices architecture, aligning staff engineers around a unified architectural vision for efficiency and performance. • Pioneered research and design for an event-driven materialized view for storefront data, demonstrating its potential to drastically improve response times. ### Staff Software Engineer @ BigCommerce Jan 2016 – Jan 2019 | San Francisco • Led the rewrite of the storefront platform by developing a microservice architecture combining Scala and Node.js using gRPC streaming to connect the ingress service with rendering components and data providers, aggregating data in parallel, to achieve a 50% improvement in rendering times while maintaining zero downtime during peak holiday traffic (20k+ requests per second). • Oversaw technical direction for multiple teams related to the storefront, including Storefront, Merchandising and Search. ### Lead Software Engineer @ BigCommerce Jan 2014 – Jan 2016 | San Francisco • Led key initiatives developing partner integrations (OAuth/SSO provider, API Gateway, App & Theme Marketplace, Developer Portal) and contributed to the launch of the Stencil theme framework, enabling modern JavaScript development with a robust local environment. • Winner of two Hackathon awards: Engineering Excellence and MVP ### Founder @ Ruby Cloud Jan 2006 – Jan 2014 | San Francisco Founded a full-service web application development firm that delivered complete digital products—from concept to deployment—leveraging full-stack development, DevOps, and technical consulting for dozens of clients including National Geographic, Minted, and Seventh Generation. • Leadership: Oversaw business planning, technical architecture, and delivery of digital products across multiple industries. Mentored and managed development teams, ensuring agile best practices and the delivery of maintainable, high-quality code. • Project Delivery: Engineered and launched impactful web applications including topo.com, a comprehensive recreational mapping platform and community for National Geographic; Rightscenter, a searchable database for film rights of literary works; and StudentStock, a platform empowering student photographers to showcase and sell their work. Delivered on time and within budget while ensuring scalability, high performance, and an exceptional user experience. • Technical Versatility: Leveraged a broad range of technologies (e.g., Ruby on Rails, Python, PHP, JavaScript, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Heroku, PostgreSQL) to build robust, high-performance web applications. • Strategic Consulting: Provided end-to-end technical consultation and business planning, driving digital transformation and operational efficiency. ### Software Engineer @ ReadyForZero Jan 2011 – Jan 2012 | San Francisco DevOps lead for a Y Combinator (YC) startup, optimizing cloud infrastructure, deploying monitoring tools, and establishing robust deployment practices. ### Software Engineer @ Hug Energy Jan 2009 – Jan 2010 | San Francisco Second engineer at a clean energy startup, developing realtime streaming APIs for power consumption metrics and automated control systems for smart devices. ### Director of Engineering @ Rolling Orange Jan 2004 – Jan 2006 | San Mateo, CA Directed engineering operations and provided technical consulting for high-profile clients such as Carnegie Hall, Princeton University, San Francisco Symphony, Stanford University. ### Senior Software Engineer @ National Geographic Society Jan 2002 – Jan 2004 | San Francisco Played a key role in developing award-winning desktop software products. ### Software Architect and Lead Software Engineer @ Rightscenter Jan 1999 – Jan 2002 | Palo Alto, CA Tech Lead and Architect for high-performance web application for literary agents, enabling secure presentations and online rights negotiations. ### Senior Software Engineer @ iXL Enterprises (now Razorfish) Jan 1998 – Jan 1999 | San Francisco Developed innovative web solutions for major brands including Sun Microsystems, Microsoft, and Cisco. ### Software Engineer @ TicketWeb Jan 1997 – Jan 1998 | San Francisco Bay Area Contributed to initial prototype of a real-time seating reservation system for live events. Later acquired by Ticketmaster. ### Software Engineer @ Pixar Animation Studios Jan 1995 – Jan 1996 Contributed to the production and internationalization of the “Toy Story Animated StoryBook” and assisted in finalizing multimedia integration. ## Education ### B.A. in Computer Science University of California, Berkeley ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/mattolson - Portfolio: http://mattolson.com - GitHub: https://github.com/mattolson --- Source: https://flows.cv/matthewolson JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/matthewolson/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-10