Matt Stowe
Leader | Advocate | Artisan

Expertise

Engineering Management

Strategic Planning

Software Architecture

DevOps

Agile Teams

Budget / Cost Control

IT Governance

Product Development

Client Relationship Management

Contract Negotiation

Education

B.S., Commerce and Economics, University of Virginia

Certified Public Accountant

Profile

With passion and strategic problem solving, I create outstanding products from business ideas. I inspire organizations to build world class technology teams, scaling product development with creative, collaborative, and disciplined technology practices; I drive growth and business value.

Experience

LearnPlatform

Vice President of Engineering | 2022 - Present

Leading engineering for an education technology Software as a Service (SaaS) platform that enables evidence based decisions in school districts. The platform leverages over 2 billion new data points per week to drive better student outcomes quickly and cost-effectively. Responsible for all aspects of platform delivery including development, data engineering, quality assurance, infrastructure, technical customer support, and systems reliability and uptime.

  • Launched LearnPlatform's first iOS application, expanding LearnPlatform's market opporutnity to iOS based school districts. Architected the rollout and support model for the Apple Mobile Device Management (MDM) capable application.
  • Created cross-functional teams with end-to-end delivery responsibilty for each company objective. Partnered with organizations across the company to build each team with all stakeholders needed to discover, test, and continously ship functionality.
  • Established technical investment as a first class objective on the product roadmap. Focused on security, performance, technical debt remediation, and DevOps improvements, this investment not only impacts customer experience but also shapes delivery velocity.

    • NewsTech

    Vice President of Engineering | 2019 - 2022

    Led platform engineering teams for Reel, a Software as a Service (SaaS) mobile delivery product. Responsible for the delivery of frameworks, services, and tools of 10+ product development teams. Founder and chief advocate of the site reliability engineering (SRE) practice for Reel, partnered with teams, vendors, and customers to create efficient practices that drive scale and growth.

  • Envisioned and managed the strategy of global engineering teams; responsible for creating engineering roadmaps, DevOps, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), and test automation tooling.
  • Recruited and built engineering teams across 4 time zones.
  • Advocated and drove consensus on architectural changes that redefined product operating models. Established a Request for Comment (RFC) process and architectural board to collaboratively adopt changes with partner engineering teams.
  • Championed the creation of reliability and resiliency practices to engineering team leads. Leveraged metrics and data driven decisions so that engineering teams are empowered to proactively identify issues and build failure resistant features.

    • Matt Stowe

    New York Times

    Principal Advisor| 2014 - 2019

    Advisor that provided comprehensive technical vision and delivered highly scalable solutions, development processes, team culture, and quality control. Spearheaded creation of an innovative delivery strategy for all New York Times content through a new API platform, fulfilling over 40 billion requests per week. Built trust with engineering and product teams across the organization to drive adoption and encourage product driven development.

  • Partnered with product delivery and editorial teams to build consensus and adopt GraphQL as an organizational standard. The collaboratively developed company-wide schema consolidated over 15 million published articles into a predictable structure, empowering customer facing engineering teams to ship cross-team features fast.
  • Achieved near zero downtime, despite breaking news traffic spikes of 10-100 times beyond average rates, by developing and implementing a comprehensive strategy of automated detection and mitigation. Coordinated with engineering and product teams in organization wide "war-game" exercises to harden the technology stack ahead of the 2016 and 2018 elections.
  • Transformed product delivery blueprint so that new features can be delivered multiple times daily. Eliminated all manual testing with robust sets of automated tests and developed key performance indicators (KPIs) for automatic rollout/rollback decisions.
  • Architected cloud operations model to expand system footprint into multiple regions and deliver geo-located workloads, improving overall customer experience with a faster and more resilient user interface.

    • The Daily Beast

    Chief Technology Officer | 2011 - 2014

    Technology executive of The Daily Beast (Webby Award 2012, 2013 for Best News Site) responsible for all phases of technology strategy including, but not limited to, software engineering, quality assurance, dev-ops, recruiting, partner service level agreement (SLAs) definitions, and vendor management.

  • Developed multi-year cloud-based strategy that modernized technology stacks, invested in automated detection and recovery systems, institutionalized incident management processes, and created product driven engineering practices. Implemented changes dramatically increased resiliency and enabled extensive product experimentation.
  • Envisioned research and development practices that engaged engineering, editorial, and product teams to collaboratively prototype new digital publishing solutions. Incubated features reduced infrastructure costs by 10%, improved overall user interface performance by 25%, and provided a powerful development framework empowering several new web, mobile, and tablet offerings.
  • Streamlined product delivery by breaking down engineering, editorial, and product silos with Agile practices. Time to market of new features and content production increased over 40%, driving customer growth of over 150% without additional technology costs.

    • Conde Nast

    Director of Engineering | 2007 - 2011

    Chief Architect for the next generation content management and delivery system for 20 award winning online brands including: Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, GQ, Epicurious, Wired, and Glamour. Collectively accounting for over 500 million page views/month, responsibilities included, but were not limited to, designing and leading development, rollout, and on-going operations of a Software as a Service (SaaS) publishing platform for all digital Conde Nast brands. Managed development teams of 20+ senior engineers in addition to 10+ offshore and multi-sourced engineers.

    Digital Focus

    Principal | 1999 - 2007

    Served as a member of the consulting leadership team. Directly responsible for technical vision, system and software architecture design, facilitating issue resolution and status with senior clients, software development configuration management, system deployment, and technical management across projects valued between $750K and $3M yearly.