Professional Summary
Technical leader with 17 years at Constant Contact. Earlier years were spent in customer-facing support roles; from 2013 I moved into hands-on template development, and from 2017 I designed and built the company's email and landing page document system. I worked closely with product owners and managers, who relied on my industry knowledge and technical expertise to help shape the platform's roadmap and priorities, and I led the technical design and delivery of major initiatives, including a generative AI campaign creation feature. Looking to bring that same technical depth, industry judgment, and cross-functional influence to a new role.
Product & Technical Leadership
- AI product development: led the technical design and delivery of a generative AI feature for campaign creation, including prompt engineering and LLM-as-judge evaluation (Arize, Langfuse)
- Personally builds with AI-assisted development tools (Claude Code and OpenCode, using flagship and open models) to prototype and ship product ideas
- Roadmap influence through technical and industry expertise: partnered closely with product owners, providing the deep technical and email-industry knowledge relied on to help prioritize and shape the platform's direction
- Cross-functional leadership: served as the primary technical point of contact and reviewer for template and rendering work across Engineering, Design, and Product, leading cross-team technical decisions
- Accessibility: co-created a grassroots accessibility program, drove remediation following third-party audits, and built accessibility into the document framework so customers could produce accessible emails and landing pages themselves
- Data-informed decision making: used adoption, usage, and completion metrics, including a sustained 85% campaign creation-to-send rate, to inform prioritization
- Technical fluency: expert-level HTML/CSS, working knowledge of JavaScript, and experience reading and editing Ruby and Python codebases, enabling direct collaboration with engineering on scope and feasibility
- Communication: recognized across performance reviews for clear, precise technical communication, with one manager noting having met few people who convey technical detail and interactions as effectively
Professional Experience
Constant Contact, Waltham, MA - 2009 to 2026
Sr. Principal Template Engineer, 2022 to 2026
- Led the technical design and delivery of a generative AI feature for campaign creation (starting 2024), which grew from an initial template-picker feature into a core part of the dashboard and onboarding experience
- Owned prompt engineering and evaluation for the feature: authored prompt intents for each content piece and built an LLM-as-judge eval pipeline (Arize, later Langfuse) to score outputs against real and synthetic customer prompts, iterating and documenting measured improvements before shipping prompt changes; also used evals to compare output and judge models, balancing cost against output quality
- Designed and built a new theme metadata object that let the AI match a theme to a user's prompt, so generated campaigns aligned in both content and visual design, not just copy
- Ensured AI-generated documents were accessible by enforcing proper heading hierarchy, sufficient text/color contrast in themes, and alt text on images
- Drove accessibility remediation following third-party audits, scoping and prioritizing the necessary changes with product; co-created a grassroots accessibility program with a design-system engineer partner, advocating best practices across the org without top-down mandate
- Consulted with the team that built BrandKit, Constant Contact's automated branding feature, on top of the theme architecture; the design I had implemented let them ship it with minimal build effort
- Served as the primary technical point of contact and reviewer for template and rendering work across Engineering, Design, and Product
- Used AI-assisted development tools to build and ship frontend and backend features beyond my original scope, with code running in production
Principal Template Engineer, 2019 to 2022
- Drove the technical direction and continued evolution of the framework's component and theming architecture, expanding the theme system's scope and adding new components as new product needs arose
- Advocated for retiring a legacy landing page editor in favor of a unified platform; partnered with UX, Product, and Engineering to define the plan, then architected and built the components and form system that shipped it
- Drove accessibility remediation following third-party audits, helping identify and scope the necessary changes
- Reviewed template and rendering work across teams and helped guide cross-team technical decisions
Sr. Template Engineer II, User Experience, 2017 to 2019
- Designed and built a new email and landing page document framework built from reusable template components, structured and stored in JSON and rendered on demand, ensuring past and future campaigns always use the latest code for reliable inbox and browser rendering (framework planning began in 2016, development in 2017). I shared this atomic, component-based approach in my Litmus Live 2019 talk, "Atomic Email Development."
- Designed and built the theme architecture as a foundational piece of the initial document format, defining how colors and their relationships map to document styles
- Worked directly with software engineering teams to bring the new framework to the desktop and mobile campaign editors
- Cultivated relationships with sales, marketing, and product management to promote email best practices and design standards across the company
Sr. Product Template Developer, 2015 to 2017
Previously: Product Template Developer (2015), Template Programmer (2013 to 2015)
- Led the template team in building and maintaining 200+ mobile-responsive email templates for Constant Contact's third-generation editor
- Led migration of template source code to GitHub and built a reusable snippet system to scale template delivery
Early Career, 2005 to 2013
Began in customer support and web design roles, including running an independent web design business, before joining Constant Contact in 2009. Spent several years in customer-facing support and custom services roles before moving into hands-on template development in 2013.
Education
Homeschooled, High School Diploma
Self- and community-taught practitioner
Active member of the #EmailGeeks community
References
"There is nobody I can recall who cares for his craft and his customers as much as Matt..."
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