Staff software engineer · Platform & developer experience · Columbus OH

I build the platform the other engineers build on.

Ten years in regulated financial systems. I've built the monitoring other teams copied, the shared libraries other domains adopted, and the standards a scrum team now codes against — including the ones for agentic AI.

Get in touch ↓ Résumé (PDF) LinkedIn ↗
Vitaliy Matiyash
Now
Staff Software Engineer, Bread Financial
Also
Engineering Product Lead — agentic AI standards
Depth
Java, Spring Boot, Kafka, Azure, Kubernetes
Outside
10 conference sessions
Bread Financial JPMorgan Chase Verizon Wireless

Selected work

Bread Financial · customer & account domain

Core applications onto Azure

Led the migration of core customer-facing applications to Azure, containerized on Kubernetes and Docker, and moved the Account API onto Azure Kubernetes Service for scale and resilience.

Then built the monitoring that wasn't there — dashboards and alerts for the most critical services, the standards behind them, and coaching for lead engineers in other domains so they could do the same. One tuning pass took a chatty service from roughly 8,000 calls in a ten-minute window to under 500.

  • Azure
  • Kubernetes / AKS
  • Docker
  • Grafana / Prometheus
  • ServiceNow / CMDB
−20%
Infrastructure cost
+25%
System reliability
8,000 → <500
Web-service calls per 10 min, after tuning

APIs customers can serve themselves with

Designed and delivered the REST APIs and self-service features behind customer-facing journeys — more people finishing the task themselves, fewer of them calling to finish it.

The largest was a consent API built from the ground up as tech lead. It introduced Kafka to the team's ecosystem for event-driven processing and OAuth2 for a secure partner integration. It now ships in daylight, with a documented rollback plan and validation passing every time.

  • Java / Spring Boot
  • Apache Kafka
  • OAuth2
  • REST
+15%
Customer engagement
−10%
Support cost

Leadership

Technical leadership without the manager title

Tech lead, developer experience

Led the Platform Enablement / Developer Experience team: built the roadmap and backlog for Kafka and the internal developer portal, drove a shared library to adoption by another domain, and integrated it with the profile API. Reported team progress to leadership and cleared the blockers.

Mentoring and hiring

Mentored five junior engineers and coached the scrum team on Java best practices and code quality. Interviewed engineering candidates across the US and India.

The escalation point

On-call rotation across incident, problem and change queues inside SLA, and a member of the quick-response team for production incidents. When other teams need to know how an API behaves or where a dependency really lives, the question comes to me.

Teaching, internally

Lightning Talks on OAuth2 and on agentic coding workflows with the Copilot CLI. Led a team through the company-wide hackathon, which placed for technical implementation.

What I'm working on now

Agentic AI · engineering standards

Code production stopped being the bottleneck. Requirement quality, constraints and standards became one.

I hold a stretch assignment as Engineering Product Lead for agentic AI alongside the staff engineering work: deciding which backlog items are AI-ready and which need a human, setting the minimum a ticket must carry before an agent acts on it, marking the work an agent should never touch, and rewriting the Definition of Done around unit tests, NFRs, documentation and API contracts.

The same instinct as the monitoring work, one layer up: write the standard once, and everyone's output gets better. It also feeds the talks — the skills-library architecture, the KQL assistant, the runbook agent are all this work, generalized.

  • Feb 2026 Named AI Product Lead
  • May 2026 Innovator Award — Copilot adoption across engineering and product workflows
  • Ongoing Contributor to an internal AI skills library

Speaking

10 sessions · 4 conferences

Title slide: Deceptive UX Patterns

7 runs · 45 min

Deceptive UX Patterns

Roach Motel. Privacy Zuckering. Confirmshaming. The manipulative patterns your product may already ship — and what to build instead.

Watch ↗ Slides Write-up

Title slide: Java Anti-Patterns

2 runs · 60 min

Java Anti-Patterns

The idioms that pass code review and fail in production, pulled from a decade of migrations in financial services.

Slides

Playable data viz

13 pieces · hand-coded D3.js v7

See all 13 →

Writing

Conference notes · deep dives

Ukrainian Cultural Association of Ohio · volunteer

Director of IT for a nonprofit

Technical leadership and infrastructure management for a cultural nonprofit — WordPress ecosystems, G-Suite administration, and payment gateway infrastructure, kept running by one person alongside a full-time job.

  • WordPress
  • G-Suite
  • Payments
ucao.us ↗

Experience

Staff Software Engineer Bread Financial
Senior Application Developer Bread Financial
Software Engineer Consultant JPMorgan Chase & Co.
Full Stack Software Engineer Verizon Wireless
BA, Computer Science Hunter College, CUNY
Full résumé (PDF) ↓

Stack

Languages
Java (J2EE), TypeScript, JavaScript, SQL
Platform
Azure, AWS, Kubernetes, Docker, Jenkins, Azure DevOps, Ansible
Architecture
Microservices, event-driven (Kafka), REST APIs, OAuth2
Frameworks & data
Spring Boot, Node.js, Angular, Redis · SQL Server, Cosmos DB, MySQL
Observability
Grafana, Prometheus, Azure Monitor, ServiceNow / CMDB
Also
GitHub Copilot and agentic workflows, WCAG accessibility, D3.js v7
Columbus, Ohio

Get in touch.

Email is the fastest way to reach me — I reply inside a day.

vmatiyash@gmail.com LinkedIn ↗ ↓ Résumé (PDF)