👋 I'm Matt — a backend-focused engineer with 15+ years building and shipping production systems. Most of my work sits at the intersection of backend engineering and data: APIs, integrations, event-driven services and data workflows that support real products. On the AI side I ship LLM and retrieval-based features as part of production systems, not experiments.

Core toolkit: Node.js/TypeScript, Python, SQL and distributed systems. Comfortable across clouds and infrastructure, and in React/Next.js on the frontend when the work calls for it.

Currently open to new client work and product partnerships — UK-based, mostly remote.

⚡ Technical Depth

I like building systems that are boring in the best way: reliable, observable, and easy to evolve. The areas I go deepest in:

Backend & APIs

TypeScript/Node, Python, C#. Well-shaped service boundaries and APIs that age well.

Data systems (SQL & NoSQL)

Data modelling, query performance, ETL/ELT pipelines and the joins, indexes and migrations that hold them together.

Event-driven & serverless

Kafka, Event Hubs, Azure Service Bus, Azure Functions and AKS — designing for throughput, retries and failure modes that don't wake anyone up.

Practical AI in production

RAG and semantic search, LLM pipelines combining deterministic logic with structured outputs, evaluation and monitoring, and the safety work — prompt-injection defences, PII redaction, auditability and GDPR-aligned data handling — that lets these ship into regulated environments. I also work AI-assisted in my own delivery, using modern coding tools to ship client work faster.

Platform integrations

Microsoft 365, Stripe, Zoom, Zendesk, SSO — pulling third-party systems together so they behave as one.

Identity, auth & compliance

OAuth/OIDC, permissions across organisational boundaries, GDPR-aligned data handling and auditability.

📚 Education & Credentials

Degrees

BSc Computer Science, University of Warwick
MSc Psychology (Distinction), University of Hertfordshire

Certifications

Supervised Machine Learning: Regression and Classification, Stanford Online

Recognition

Google Chrome Featured Badge for Simple Screen Break, a Chrome extension I built and shipped.

The combination of computer science and psychology has been surprisingly useful when building software that people actually want to use, especially where AI is involved.

🏢 Sectors I've Shipped In

Work across enterprise, public sector, regulated industries and startups — the named clients below give the shape of it:

Enterprise

DHL, Sainsbury's, Nike, Experian, CloudBees, Configit, MSX International

Public sector & education

Department for Education, Juniper Education, Redware

Legal, professional services & finance

Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, REED, Delta Financial Systems

Startups & scale-ups

Waltz, Blue Edge AI, Spencer, GlowDay, Kindred.co

Growing businesses

Frazier's Wine Merchants, Big Sky Additions

🛡️ Cybersecurity Apps I'm Building

Alongside client work I'm building Cloak — a set of consumer cybersecurity apps that help non-technical users spot dodgy links and pages before they tap them. Multi-platform, with a shared heuristic core.

Cloak Check — Chrome extension

URL and page safety verdicts in plain English. Detects homograph attacks, brand-as-subdomain spoofing, excessive subdomain depth and IDN edge cases, plus page-level signals from response headers, cookies and DOM patterns. Install on the Chrome Web Store.

Cloak Mobile — iOS & Android (in development)

A Flutter app that runs the same URL heuristics on shared links and scanned QR codes — the most common ways non-technical users encounter malicious links on a phone. The URL analysis is a Dart port of the extension's core, with parity tests against the JS implementation.

Stack

TypeScript · Chrome extension APIs · Dart/Flutter · iOS share extensions · Android intent filters

✍️ Writing & Sharing

I write about backend and AI engineering on Medium and post short demos and walkthroughs on YouTube. Outside that: travelling and learning whatever I'm not yet good at.

🤝 Let's Connect

Open to new client work and product partnerships — UK-based, mostly remote. Best way to reach me is via LinkedIn. I work through my limited company, Solid Code Solutions.