Matt Hallowell

With over 6 years of experience in distributed systems, I design and scale high-performance architectures — focusing on vectorized data processing, real-time systems, and applied AI.

Most recently, I re-architected a legacy monolith into a distributed Polars & Dagster pipeline — processing 40M+ daily records and reducing ETL runtime by 97% (5.5h → 16m).

I'm currently architecting a Model Context Protocol server to enable agentic workflows and optimizing RAG pipelines.

Previously, I engineered Zoom for Government infrastructure (FedRAMP/IL4) to support federal agencies.

Before that, I developed low-latency voice processing systems and DSP encryption in C++ at Motorola for mission-critical 911 dispatch communications.

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Matt Hallowell

Slickdeals LLC San Mateo, CA

Senior Software Engineer August 2024 - Present
  • Designed and led migration from PHP monolith to distributed Python/Dagster platform, executing zero-downtime cutover via traffic-mirroring shadow tests on EKS to validate 40M+ daily records.
  • Redesigned ETL logic using Polars and distributed EKS fan-out jobs, replacing brittle heuristics to cut runtime by 97% (5.5h → 16m) and reducing infrastructure costs by 40%.
  • Architected a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server to standardize real-time context retrieval for internal LLM agents, enabling RAG workflows that increased recommendation outclicks by 24%.
  • Modernized DevEx by implementing a uv-based Python monorepo and automated ArgoCD pipelines, optimizing GitHub Actions for faster smoke testing and deployment velocity (10m → 2m).

Zoom Video Communications Seattle, WA

Software Engineer - Infrastructure May 2022 – August 2024
  • Engineered backend systems for Zoom for Government, enabling IL4/FedRAMP-compliant video/chat services for federal agencies and contributing to $10M+ in contract wins.
  • Developed a custom CVE scanner in Go and GitLab CI, automating vulnerability triage and saving 30+ engineer hours per month.
  • Architected a Go-based Prometheus alerting service for GitOps/PagerDuty integration, streamlining on-call workflows and incident response.
  • Developed reusable Terraform modules to automate AWS infrastructure provisioning, reducing manual configuration errors across Kubernetes clusters.

Motorola Solutions Chicago, IL

Software Engineer II November 2019 – May 2022
Software Engineer I July 2018 – November 2019
  • Built and optimized a Node.js REST API for real-time connection management, implementing deterministic routing to eliminate lookup overhead, cutting worst case latency by 87% (2.3s → 0.3s).
  • Developed digital signal processing modules in C++ for encrypted voice transmission and containerized audio processing for safety-critical 911 dispatch systems.
  • Implemented load testing frameworks to validate system resilience under 1,600 concurrent radio calls, identifying and resolving critical performance bottlenecks.
  • Migrated messaging infrastructure from Kafka to Redis Pub/Sub, reducing latency for real-time delivery in a high-throughput environment.

Education

DePaul University Chicago, IL

B.S. Computer Science June 2018

Technical Skills

Languages: Python, Java, JavaScript, C++, Go
Cloud: AWS (EKS, S3, RDS, ElastiCache, MSK, IAM, Route 53), Kubernetes, Terraform
DevOps: GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Docker, Helm, env0
Data/Infra: Dagster, Kafka, Redis, Prometheus, Postgres, MySQL, OpenShift, RAG/LLM Engineering

Awards & Interests

Eagle Scout, Boy Scouts of America (May 2013)
Backpacking, Guitar, Hiking, Cycling, Cross Country Skiing, Car Enthusiast

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