Hi there
I’m Matt Connley,
an experienced IT leader and innovator based in Chicago
- 25+ Years Experience
- 5 Industries
- 9 Happy Employers
The compute in my home lab consists of six Intel NUCs. I hope to describe my rationale for choosing these PCs in greater detail in a future post, but for my purposes they work well. I’m fortunate enough these days to have a closet in which I run my entire lab environment, and which will […] ... [ Read More! ]
My full blog is available at https://blog.connley.net
I've been fascinated by technology for as long as I can remember.
Growing up, I loved to take things apart and put them back together. Tinkering with radios, cassette players, other various gadgets, toys, and of course Legos was part of my everyday fun. Soon PCs gained my interest, and while I may not have known it at the time, it was the start of an enduring desire to figure out how things work -- and find ways to make them work better.
I began my career relatively early, starting my first job at a local ISP when I was 16. Since then I've worked in a number of environments, ranging from small-town startups to global enterprises. I take great pride and pleasure in building creative, innovative solutions to the real-world problems I come across, and never turn down the chance to help make businesses more effective and efficient at what they do, no matter how daunting the challenge.
Over the course of my career, I've cultivated a diverse work background that spans engineering, architecture, and technical leadership. I've developed highly-available, highly-parallel, service-oriented applications supporting functions such as infrastructure and business process monitoring, trading operations, and centralized systems management. I also led the delivery of a private cloud platform and am currently the principal architect on an enterprise-wide observability program.
I pride myself on being as full-stack an engineer as I can, from the user experience all the way down "to the metal."
To me, technology is more than a career; it's something I love and a life-long passion that I'm lucky enough to pursue every day. Despite the fact that I've been in this field for over two decades, according to that old adage, I've never really worked a day in my life.
IaaS Product Manager/Lead Engineer. Principal architect and lead engineer for six development, observability, automation, and infrastructure teams totaling 60+ engineers. Key contributor to cloud/Azure migration program.
CEO Award Recipient – Charles Schwab 2019
Most Innovative Employee Award Recipient – optionsXpress 2011
At optionsXpress and then Schwab, I strove to bring innovation to everything I did.
At oX, that meant building new monitoring and management tools and developing some more effective applications for our brokers to handle issues that arose with orders. These tools allowed the dev, devops/SRE, and business teams to focus on features and do more with less.
After oX was acquired by Schwab, my focus shifted to infrastructure automation. I was fortunate to act as technical lead on a program that built a private cloud platform which delivered in 30 minutes compute resources that previously took 60-90 days. I also worked to help teams integrate that IaaS toolset into their CI/CD pipelines using Infrastructure as Code principles.