Matt Connley profile picture

Hi there I’m Matt Connley,
an experienced IT leader and innovator based in Chicago

  • 25+ Years Experience
  • 5 Industries
  • 9 Happy Employers

My Latest Blog Post - 08/08/2024 20:54:16 Central

3D Printed Intel NUC Rack Mount

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

About Me

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.


High-Level Skills

  • Software Development
  • Enterprise Architecture
  • Technical Leadership and Mentoring
  • SRE
  • DevOps
  • Infrastructure Automation
  • Monitoring and Observability
  • Cloud Migration

Technical Skills

  • .NET/C#
  • VMWare vSphere/vRealize Suite including vRA
  • Windows, IIS, Active Directory
  • Linux
  • ASP.NET/Core, MVC, RESTful services
  • WCF and WPF
  • SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL
  • SaltStack

Non-Technical Skills

  • Excellent Written Communication
  • Collaborative, Team-Oriented Mindset
  • Relationship Builder
  • Strong Presentation/Speaking Ability

Certifications

  • Microsoft Azure Fundamentals/AZ-900 - 2022
  • Lean IT Foundation - 2018
  • Microsoft Certified Systems Administrator - 2005 (expired)

Other Interests

  • Sailing
  • Home Labbing
  • Home Automation
  • Baseball

Recent Work Experience

August 2021 - Present

U.S. Bank

Vice President - Lead Engineer

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.

  • As Product Manager and Lead Engineer, build private cloud/IaaS capability in alignment with strategic goals and driving engineering for net-new enterprise product.
  • Unify multiple management and observability services into a single cohesive enterprise product.
  • Authored, published, and obtained Enterprise Architecture adoption of bank-wide observability-related specifications that extend existing industry standards.
  • Functioned as principal architect on enterprise logging and observability program.
  • Recommended multiple aspects of cloud design and migration plan. Advised on best practices and technical implementation details.
  • Led development team to provide logging and observability APIs for enterprise consumption, automating 60+ day request-based processes into self-service interface withinstant fulfillment.
2006 - 2021

Charles Schwab / optionsXpress

Principal Engineer/Technical Director

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.

  • As Technical Director/Principal Engineer, designed all significant aspects of end-to-end IaaS solution using vRealize Automation, custom UI/REST API, SaltStack, and a number of custom solutions
  • Acted as technical lead on the implementation and integration of the IaaS platform with cross-funtional teams and application teams
  • Principal or sole developer of a number of applications, including monitoring and management plane software, trade desk applications, and back-office automation tools