Matt G. Wagner - Resume
I am a versatile and seasoned technical leader with over fourteen years of experience, specializing in architecting and mentoring distributed engineering teams. My professional journey has taken me from Fortune 50 corporations to co-founding innovative startups. In parallel, I have dedicated over twelve years to serving as an Officer in the Army National Guard, where I've assumed roles as an on-the-ground commander and coordinator, leading National Guard Soldiers in critical emergency response scenarios. My unwavering passion for my craft drives me to consistently deliver exceptional results in every undertaking.
Technical Skills
Primary Language / Ecosystem: C# / .NET, Microsoft Azure
Active U.S Government Security Clearance
Professional Coaching, Organizational Leadership
Agile Project Management (Traditional Scrum & Kanban) via Azure DevOps, JIRA, Basecamp, Trello
Databases: SQL Server, SQLite, PostgreSQL, Azure Cosmos DB, Redis
Front-end Frameworks such as Blazor and ReactJS
API Design and Documentation: REST, Swagger/OpenAPI specifications, Service-Oriented Architecture and Microservices
Low-Code/No-Code Solutions: AirTable, Knack, Glide
Build & Deployment Systems: Azure DevOps, AppVeyor, TeamCity, Jenkins, Docker
Distributed Caching and Messaging via Redis and Azure Storage Queues and Service Bus
Systems Administration: Microsoft Windows Server 2003-2022+, Ubuntu, Mac OS
Professional Experience
Owner, Chief Technology Officer - June 2018 - Present
Designed and delivered customized technical leadership development programs, offering direct coaching to leadership teams of diverse clients.
Provided bespoke software engineering and consulting services to a wide array of small and medium-sized business clients.
Successfully led a team of senior-level developers, ensuring the delivery of top-quality outcomes across various business domains.
Demonstrated self-driven initiative by overseeing the completion of User Stories and feature requests, showcasing a versatile skillset ranging from business-driven PDF form generation to Azure AD and OpenID Connect SSO implementations.
Proficiently managed time-tracking, reporting, client invoicing, and bookkeeping tasks to maintain organized and efficient operations.
Created highly interactive and responsive user interfaces, utilizing Blazor Web Assembly in conjunction with Dotnet backends defined by OpenAPI standards.
Designed and implemented custom integrations and financial analysis tools using Procore construction management APIs with OAuth authentication.
Partner, Chief Technology Officer - June 2020 - Present
Technical co-founder of B2B Software-as-a-Service product, from ideation through product launch and ongoing hands-on engineering
Lead developer for system supporting 30M API requests per month
Responsible for technical architecture and implementation utilizing the latest Dotnet tools, Azure Cosmos DB, Blazor, and Redis
Operational customer support and production monitoring through FreshDesk and Azure dashboards
Grew product to hundreds of active concurrent users with paid, monthly subscriptions billed through Stripe integration
Founder - March 2023 - Present
Pioneered the development of a comprehensive Software as a Service (SaaS) solution tailored specifically for US Army leaders, overseeing the entire implementation process from inception to delivery.
Spearheaded the integration of advanced language models, including OpenAI's GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, to enhance the generation of evaluation paperwork, significantly improving efficiency and accuracy.
Leveraged Stripe for seamless payment processing and seamlessly integrated it within the workflow via Make.com, ensuring a streamlined and user-friendly payment experience for customers.
Orchestrated all aspects of marketing and demand generation efforts, employing a mix of precision-targeted advertisements and organic growth strategies to establish WriteMyNCOER.com as a prominent resource within the military community.
MOS 13A, Field Artillery Officer - September 2011 - Present
Currently serving as Commander of Headquarters and Headquarters Battery, responsible for leading 110+ Soldiers and $41mm worth of equipment
Served as Commander for M777A2 artillery battery, responsible for leading 85+ Soldiers and $50mm+ of equipment
Experience in operational planning, organizational leadership, logistical support, mentoring, and personnel development
Performed on-the-ground tactical leadership of a Field Artillery firing battery during numerous live fire operations
Commanded and coordinated 80+ Soldiers during training and state emergency response operations, including five major catastrophic hurricanes and two presidential inaugurations
U.S. Government Security Clearance
Served as a Commander, Executive Officer, Platoon Leader, and Fire Direction Officer with collateral duties as the Knowledge Management Officer and Safety Officer
NATO Allied Rapid Response Cell exercise experience including coordination and training via Operation Dynamic Front 18 in Germany
Training & Schools
IS-00230.d: Fundementals of Emergency Management (FEMA)
IS-240.B: Leadership and Influence (FEMA)
Field Artillery Captain’s Career Course, Fort Sill, OK (2017-2019)
Field Artillery Basic Officer Leadership Course, Fort Sill, OK (2014)
Officer Candidate School, Florida Regional Training Institute, Camp Blanding Joint Training Center (2012, 2013)
Basic Combat Training, Fort Sill, OK (2011)
Principal Architect - October 2021 - Present
Skills & Technologies
Proficient in Dotnet 5/6/7 and C#
Experienced with Docker Containers
Skilled in Continuous Integration using Azure DevOps and GitHub Actions
Accomplished in building and publishing apps for Google Play Store and Apple App Store
Proficient in Microsoft Azure infrastructure management
Roles & Achievements
Chair of Architecture Review Board: Led the architecture review board for all significant projects and platform changes, with a specific focus on enhancing scalability, resiliency, and observability through metrics, dashboards, and alerting.
Mentorship and Coaching: Provided guidance and mentorship to developers across senior to junior levels, emphasizing best practices and fostering their career development.
Scalable Background Processing Engine: Successfully designed and built a scalable background processing engine to efficiently offload resource-intensive tasks, enhancing system performance.
Information Security Leadership: Led the Information Security (InfoSec) team, overseeing Business Continuity Planning and Disaster Recovery preparedness to fortify the organization's security and resilience.
Recruitment and Onboarding: Actively participated in the recruitment, interviewing, hiring, and onboarding of new team members. Additionally, assumed the role of Chief Technology Officer to contribute to the strategic leadership of the organization.
Enterprise Architect - August 2021 - November 2021
Principal Software Engineer – October 2014 - August 2017
Technologies
Dotnet 6/ASP.net Core, C#, PowerShell
Service-Oriented Architecture/Microservices
Continuous Integration via TeamCity, Octopus Deploy, Azure DevOps
Microsoft SQL Server
Automated testing via XUnit/NUnit, Moq, ApprovalTests.net
Redis for Caching, Background Job Processing, Pub/Sub
Roles & Responsibilities
Recruited, interviewed, onboarded, and mentored a team of developers and business analysts
Lead the greenfield implementation of the next-generation payroll and HR back-office application, balancing technology decisions with regards to risk/reward and stability
Groomed and triaged agile product roadmap and backlog
Responsible for design and code reviews for team
Designed and implemented our automated build, test, and deployment system to increase development velocity across the organization
Designed support frameworks to provide consolidated logging and debugging for our distributed systems
Organized and lead internal tech talks on topics such as proper exception handling, automated deployments, microservice-based architectures, and build pipelines
MercuryWorks - Tampa, FL
Principal Software Engineer - August 2017 - April 2020
Solution Architect and Technical Lead for team of 5+ cross-disciplinary engineers and product owner
Served in Engineering Manager role, mentor for junior and senior application developers, responsible for training and career development
Tech Lead for Backend Developers Guild, facilitating lunch-and-learn sessions and cross-functional knowledge sharing
Responsible for Screening, Interviewing, and Onboarding New Engineers, utilizing Jazz HR
Partnered with Product Owners to groom, plan, and manage team workflow via Azure DevOps
Designed Applicant Code Screen to improve Signal-to-Noise ratio for New Candidates through our hiring pipeline
Balanced development efforts across multiple concurrent projects and clients while maintaining focus on quality outputs
Utilized ReactJS with Aspnet WebAPI and Serverless/Azure Functions backends to wire up rich client experiences
DealerTrack Technologies, Inc (Remote Worker)
Lead Software Engineer – July 2014 - October 2014
ASR Pro, LLC (Acquired by DealerTrack in July 2014)
Senior Software Engineer - July 2012 - July 2014
Technologies
ASP.NET, MVC, C#, Windows Services
Entity Framework, Stored Procedures / T-SQL
Microsoft SQL Server
MSBuild, PowerShell, TeamCity
Source Control via Git/GitHub
Redis for distributed caching, message queue
Unit Testing via XUnit.net/NUnit
Roles & Responsibilities
Lead development reviews and architecture planning for future scaling
Restructured data access layer library and implemented distributed caching using Redis to improve performance
Analyzed metrics and profiler output to optimize code paths and improve response times 25% over 20+ million requests per week
Built automated build and deployment system that resulted in a 10x increase in developer productivity and mean time to production
Developed interview questions in order to screen engineering applicants
Implemented distributed error logging mechanism to aid production debugging
Developed job queue and scheduled jobs to manage integration processing service in primary data integration system
Produced OpenTrack.net, open source library available on GitHub and NuGet for interacting with third-party STAR-based web service
Developer II - December, 2011 - July, 2012
Roles & Responsibilities
Implemented development tool-chain to include coordination between Redmine issue tracker, SVN source control, and TeamCity automated builds
Maintained and improved online banking suite of customer-facing applications
Localized mobile banking application to aid Spanish speaking users
Configured and used RSA’s Adaptive Authentication product for analyzing fraud patterns in online banking
Software Engineer - August 2010 - September 2011
Roles & Responsibilities
Maintained and expanded a multi-tiered .NET application suite including ASP.NET front-ends and C# Web and Windows Services
Optimize processes across multiple database shards in a data-driven environment
Developed logging and error handling platform with web-accessible interface
Worked with QA and Support personnel to develop administrative interfaces and dashboards
Assisted in development of core data integration platform, allowing multi-threaded access to expedite data processing
Web Applications Developer - June 2008 - August 2010
Roles & Responsibilities
Attended JPMorganChase Corporate Development Program (CDP) Core Training in New York City on fundamentals of project management, finance, and team leadership
Lead team workshops on J2EE best practices on topics such as source control, bug tracking, exception handling, and event logging
Lead Developer on several long-term projects involving teams on-site and overseas in Mumbai, India
University of South Florida Controller’s Office - Tampa, FL
IT Systems Support - May 2007 - May 2008
University of South Florida Academic Computing Help Desk - Tampa, FL
Student Technology Consultant - January 2006 - December 2006
Conferences/Volunteering
Central Florida Software Meetup - 2023-Present
Drove the establishment of a dynamic community dedicated to nurturing connections and facilitating collaboration within the Lakeland area for professionals in software development, software-as-a-service (SaaS), technology consulting, and product development. This initiative created a vibrant platform, catering to both experienced industry veterans and budding developers, as well as individuals keen on exploring opportunities within the flourishing technology sector, enabling networking, knowledge exchange, and career development.
Avengercon V - “Rapid Application Development for Emergency Response Scenarios” - December 2020
Delivered a conference talk highlighting the strategic significance of rapid application development tools, commonly referred to as "low code" or "no-code" solutions, in effectively adapting to evolving circumstances during emergency response operations. Demonstrated how these tools offer a practical advantage in addressing the dynamic information gathering needs, shifting reporting formats, and the challenging data integration task frequently encountered within Tactical Operations Centers during emergency situations.
Introduced valuable marketplace tools that streamline and enhance "battle tracking" capabilities, emphasizing my own experience in developing a comprehensive information management workflow. This workflow efficiently transformed fragmented data from emails, texts, and disparate spreadsheets into a unified Common Operating Picture, ensuring secure accessibility for all echelons of the battalion. As a dedicated Florida National Guardsman, I leveraged my expertise gained from responding to five hurricanes within the state to provide insights and practical techniques for rapidly advancing data management processes.
Lead redesign of core public-facing website to include integrating newsletter handling, membership database, event coordination, and photo album sharing. Implemented event registration and reporting for key membership activities.
Contributed to the annual Great American Teach-In, an event organized by the Polk County Public Schools' Department of Public Relations and Strategic Partnerships during American Education Week. Engaged with the community to share personal career journeys, travel experiences, and hobbies, highlighting the relevance of early education in shaping their present lives.
Provided students with inspiring, real-world insights and encouraged them to focus on their future goals. Demonstrated a variety of engaging approaches, from interactive presentations to hands-on demonstrations, to broaden students' horizons by introducing them to new career possibilities, hobbies, and diverse experiences.
October 2017 - “Resiliency Patterns: Managing Failure in a Chaotic World”
A survey of the resiliency patterns and techniques for managing transient failures in a distributed or cloud-connected world. Topics will include circuit breakers, retries, timeouts, and bulkheads using the Polly library for C# and the Hysterix library for the JVM.
July 2016 - “Moving Fast Without Breaking Things in .NET”
I provided insight into my background and experience on the .NET platform while working in organizations that can’t afford to have outages and regressions while still embracing continuous integration and agile processes.
I am a regular member and speaker at Code Lakeland, a group that meets to discuss tech-related topics monthly. I presented improvements to the hiring and interviewing process during the March 2017 meetup.
Operation Code - Mentor
I mentored veterans of the US military who are transitioning into new careers in Information Technology and Software Development, providing interview preparation, career coaching, and side-project code reviews and insight.
Education
Degree: B.S. Computer Information Systems - Graduated May 2009
Florida Academic Scholars - Bright Futures Scholarship recipient
Men’s Varsity Baseball, 2006 - 2007
Intramural Crew Team - 2005
Major Curriculum (Abbreviated)
Software Engineering & Testing
Database Design
Information Security
Web Application Development
Financial & Managerial Accounting