Hey, I'm

Matt Williams.

Staff Site Reliability Engineer

I build infrastructure that doesn't fall over and grapple people for fun.

GitHub LinkedIn Contact
Matt Williams

About Me

Staff SRE. I build tools and kill toil.

Nearly two decades of infrastructure work - bare metal email clusters doing hundreds of thousands of transactions per second, first employee at a startup that scaled to millions of users and got acquired by Airbnb, and now reliability and observability at a multi-property sports streaming platform. Currently a Staff SRE at FloSports, where most of my job is making other teams better at running their own stuff.

When I'm not wrangling infrastructure, I'm on the mats at Appalachian Grapplers - the BJJ club my wife Rachael and I co-founded in Mt. Airy, NC.

Infrastructure

20 years building systems that don't fall over

Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu

Co-founder, Appalachian Grapplers

Career

Staff Site Reliability Engineer

FloSports 2017 - Present (Staff 2025, Senior 2017-2024)

SRE for a multi-property sports streaming platform (FloSports, TrackWrestling, HockeyTech, MileSplit) running on AWS and GCP with Kubernetes, Fastly CDN, and Datadog across the stack.

  • Built the company's SLO program from the ground up - Terraform templates, onboarding docs, walkthrough videos - and shifted ownership from infrastructure to product teams, getting product teams to own their own reliability instead of throwing it over the wall to SRE
  • Led an org-wide observability consulting program, replacing generic all-hands meetings with targeted team-by-team sessions driven by Datadog scorecards and service maturity data
  • Drove cloud cost optimization across Datadog and GCP - audited spend, evaluated and implemented ScaleOps for Kubernetes right-sizing, saving over $500K/year in cluster compute costs
  • Migrated 60+ services and jobs from GCP/GKE to AWS/EKS and GitHub Actions as part of a 3-person SRE team - full-stack migrations including CI/CD rebuilds, DNS cutover, monitoring, and secrets
  • Implemented Fastly Next-Gen WAF and DDoS protection via Terraform, activated virtual patches for active CVEs, and managed edge security across all properties
  • Led migration of TrackWrestling from AWS OpsWorks (Java/Tomcat) to a dedicated EKS cluster - Terraform-codified infrastructure, EFS-to-CSI volume migration, RDS Proxy for connection pooling, canary traffic cutover, and full Datadog observability - eliminating a hard scaling ceiling of 16 EC2 instances that couldn't sustain 600+ concurrent weekend events
  • Set up SST-based preview environments for NextGen Wrestling, giving developers isolated per-PR deployments for faster iteration and shorter feedback loops
  • Led AI adoption initiatives, presenting on AI tooling and techniques to improve developer productivity and observability practices

Founding Site Reliability Engineer

Tilt.com (acquired by Airbnb) 2011 - 2017

First employee hired. Built the entire infrastructure from scratch starting from a single server and scaled it through millions of users across 8 countries, handling hundreds of millions of dollars in transactions.

  • 100% Infrastructure as Code from day one
  • Achieved 5-9s uptime across all services
  • PCI Level 1 compliance in AWS VPC
  • Auto-scaling within 4 minutes of performance alerts
  • Built automated IPSec VPN failover system: monitor server health-checked active/standby tunnels and orchestrated EIP migration, route table updates, and instance recovery on failure
  • Docker on ECS for plug-and-play application deployment

Senior Linux Engineer

Rackspace 2007 - 2011

Joined via the Webmail.us acquisition - one of the largest email hosting platforms in the world. Managed 100+ bare-metal systems handling hundreds of thousands of transactions per second with 5-9s uptime. Led redesign and migration of the Linux/MySQL database cluster.

Systems Engineer

US Army, PD ALTESS 2005 - 2008

Managed a team overseeing 150+ Solaris UNIX and Red Hat Linux servers dedicated to serving the Army Acquisition Corps.

BS Computer Science

Radford University 2002 - 2006

Skills & Tools

Cloud & Infrastructure

AWS (multi-account) GCP Kubernetes (EKS/GKE) ECS Fargate Karpenter Terraform AWS CDK SST v3 Helm Istio Ansible

CDN & Edge Security

Fastly (VCL/NGWAF) Nginx HAProxy Varnish AWS ELB

Observability & Reliability

Datadog (full platform) PagerDuty ELK Stack StatsD

CI/CD & Developer Experience

GitHub Actions Jenkins Docker Google CloudBuild Preview Environments

Data

RDS RDS Proxy MySQL Redis ElastiCache AWS DMS

Languages

Bash/Zsh TypeScript Ruby Python Perl C++

Projects

Web Development

RW Personal Training

Full website build for Rachael Williams' online personal training business. Lead generation, program showcases, and mobile-first design.

Web DevDesignDocker

Appalachian Grapplers

Website for the BJJ club Rachael and I co-founded. Schedule, pricing, culture, and member info for a 50+ member non-profit.

Web DevDesignDocker

Sandman BJJ

Website for Sandman Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. Clean, modern design with class schedules, instructor bios, and membership info.

Web DevDesignDocker

Open Source

ThrustMaster ⭐ 2

ESP-32 based rocket motor dynamometer. Measures thrust curves, total impulse, and specific impulse with pyrotechnic ignition, countdown sequence, and SD card data logging.

C++ESP-32HX711

AltiDuo32

Dual deployment rocket altimeter built as an interrupt-driven state machine. Handles apogee detection, drogue and main chute deployment with barometric sensing.

C++ESP-32BMP280

jira-to-claudemem

Ingest Jira tickets into claude-mem for searchable institutional memory in Claude Code sessions. Turns your backlog into AI context.

ShellClaude CodeJira API

See what I'm geeking out on in my home lab

Proxmox, Docker, Tailscale, AI-powered ops - the whole stack.

Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu

Appalachian Grapplers

Co-Founder · Mt. Airy, NC

In 2024, my wife Rachael and I founded Appalachian Grapplers - a non-profit BJJ club. No contracts, no unnecessary rituals, no second mortgage. Just training.

We're NoGi focused with wrestling and judo influences, and we believe in an old-school approach: submissions over scoring points. We've grown to 50+ active members with 5 sessions per week, all volunteer-run, with every dollar going back into the club.

50+ Members
5 Sessions/Week
501(c)(7) Non-Profit
~3 Competitions/Year
appgrapplers.com
Appalachian Grapplers adult class on the mats Appalachian Grapplers youth class

What People Say

"As a founding team-member at Tilt, Matt was immediately busy with building out our infrastructure from scratch and scaling it through millions of users - always moving fast in the highly-regulated payments space. He is the type of team-member you really cherish working with because he was always 10-steps ahead, asking himself the questions that no one else would even consider asking for a few months, and usually having the right answer already implemented way before anyone asked."

James Beshara CEO, Tilt.com

"I consider Matt an expert at AWS, site reliability engineering, and linux systems. He is passionate about learning new things and is an incredibly hard worker. I believe he could help out almost any company trying to automate, scale, and manage their Cloud Infrastructure."

Brian Hartsock Director of Engineering, Tilt.com

"Matt is able to quickly ramp up on new technologies, and discern what's a fad from what will add true, lasting value to the problem at hand. You quickly learn that you can throw any new challenge Matt's way, and he will rise to, and even exceed expectations, learning whatever is necessary along the way."

William Wolf Director of Technology, Tilt.com

Get In Touch

Want to talk shop about infrastructure, jiu-jitsu, or something else entirely? Reach out.

matt@williams-tech.net mago0 mattwilliams2007