About Me
Hands-on senior engineer, product builder and tech lead, working across backend, frontend and architecture.
I'm pragmatic and product-minded: I know when to move quickly and when to invest in robustness, security and maintainability. I've launched new products, connected the systems businesses already rely on and automated slow manual work. That work has spanned early-stage products, long-running platforms, migrations and complex integration-heavy systems. I also build and run products of my own.
Experience
Over the years I've worked on software for organisations including:
- DHL
- Sainsbury's
- Department for Education
- Freshfields
- Reed
- Experian
- Nike
as well as startups and growing businesses. That has ranged from enterprise and public-sector systems to new products built from scratch alongside founders. Recent examples are on the Selected Work page.
Practical AI
I build AI features for clients and for my own products, including:
Support sessions into guides
A production workflow that turns recorded support sessions into reviewed, step-by-step guides members can keep and reuse.
Candidate shortlisting
Shortlisting job candidates against roles, cutting the time spent on manual screening.
Secure document ingestion
Securely bringing customer documents from Microsoft 365 into an AI platform's knowledge base, honouring each customer's own permissions.
Risk research agent
A workflow that monitors security and news feeds for emerging online risks to UK teens, then uses an AI agent to read the sources, check what Cloak for Schools has already covered, and draft a brief with source citations for human review.
Most of the work is in making these features dependable: checking the output before anyone relies on it, controlling who can see what, keeping running costs predictable, and having a person review the results where mistakes would matter.
I also use AI-assisted development day to day, as a tool rather than a substitute for engineering judgement.
Building products
I run Solid Code Solutions, a small software company that builds software for clients and its own products. Building and running products of my own keeps me honest about what matters in client work: shipping, cost to run, and how software behaves once real users arrive.
Cloak for Schools
An online-safety platform for secondary schools, built around short interactive lessons on risks including scams, privacy, AI and deepfakes.
Technical focus
- TypeScript / Node.js, Python, C#
- React, Next.js, JavaScript
- APIs, integrations and distributed systems
- SQL / NoSQL and data modelling
- Azure: Functions, Service Bus, Storage, Key Vault, Entra ID, App Service
- Event-driven and serverless architectures
- Identity, authentication and application security
- LLM pipelines and agents, structured output, embeddings and RAG
Education & certifications
- BSc Computer Science, University of Warwick
- MSc Psychology (Distinction), University of Hertfordshire
- Supervised Machine Learning: Regression and Classification, Stanford Online
Recognition & recommendations
“He's consistently proven himself to be one of the strongest backend engineers I've worked with. … He consistently delivers high-quality work, meets deadlines, and can be trusted to take ownership of critical projects from design through to delivery.”
“I've worked with Matt several times, most recently having hired him as a contractor. His ability to quickly grasp the wider business context, in addition to solid technical skills, enables him to contribute very effectively.”
“Matt guided a small team of developers to adopt TDD, achieving a high code coverage, in turn allowing us to adopt CI/CD methods [of] working with confidence.”
“I was very impressed with the speed that Matt was able to contribute to the project. … I would consider him to be one of the most advanced software engineers I have worked with.”
Chrome Web Store · Featured Simple Screen Break, a Chrome extension I built and shipped.
Get in touch
Get in touch if you have a software project, a practical AI feature, or a contract senior engineer or tech-lead role in mind.
I'm UK-based and work mostly remotely. LinkedIn is the best way to reach me; for company-level enquiries, go to Solid Code Solutions.