I’m Matthew Norgren, a software engineering leader based in Portland, Maine, with more than two decades building software and the teams that ship it. I specialize in organizations where execution is inconsistent. I take on turnarounds, re-architectures, and the broken systems and strained cross-team relationships that slow companies down, and I build the practices that make delivery faster, more predictable, and higher quality. I work from measurable data like cycle time, flow, and quality signals, and I aim for predictable delivery without heroics. I take ownership from diagnosis through delivery, and I’m not done until the team and the systems keep running well without me.

Today I’m Director of Software Engineering at CloudZero, where I lead a product engineering team and our Developer Experience group. I joined as the company scaled. During my tenure the engineering organization has roughly quadrupled and the customer base has grown about 2.5x. I’ve scaled my own scope to as many as four teams, hired and developed engineering managers, and kept teams delivering through layoffs, reorganizations, and shifting priorities.

What I do best

  • Turnarounds. I stabilize underperforming teams, restore delivery confidence, and repair the cross-functional relationships that have broken down. At CloudZero I led a company-wide effort that cut support escalations to engineering by over two thirds, from 34 a week to 9.5, and earned a Lighthouse award for leadership and impact.
  • Operational transformation. At Bittrex I more than doubled the rate of new blockchain integrations by changing process and taking down barriers between teams. At MapLarge I cut production regressions by roughly two orders of magnitude with trunk-based development, continuous integration and mandatory PR gates. I also shortened release cadence from 12-20 weeks down to two.
  • Scaling organizations. I’ve hired engineers and engineering managers, built team structures around clear ownership, and coached ICs and managers into leaders.
  • Leading through change. I keep teams delivering through layoffs, reorganizations, and strategic pivots. At Bittrex I sustained delivery and morale through an SEC lawsuit and the company’s exit from the U.S. market.
  • Putting AI to work. I rolled out AI tooling across all of Engineering and built and deployed multiple AI agents for issue classification, support triage, and documentation-drift detection, saving an estimated 75 hours of manual work a week.

Experience in brief

  • CloudZero: Director of Software Engineering (2024-present) and Principal Software Engineer (2023-2024). Led the company’s web platform re-architecture from QBR approval through on-time delivery, and built Connection Doctor, a hackathon project now a company-wide internal tool for platform connection visibility.
  • Bittrex: Director of Platform and Operations (2022-2023). Hired to run the fiat-payments and blockchain-integration teams, then promoted to lead the Platform and Operations group spanning blockchain and fiat integrations, DevOps, backend APIs, and keeping nodes running for hundreds of blockchains.
  • MapLarge: Director of Software Operations and earlier engineering roles (2016-2022). Ran day-to-day operations for a 40-person engineering team and scaled a public AWS platform from 200,000 to 23 million requests per hour.
  • Unidesk: Principal Developer and Scrum Master (2008-2016). Core contributor from 10 employees through a successful acquisition. Built low-level systems including a Windows filesystem mini-filter driver in C for desktop virtualization.
  • EMC: Software engineer on CLARiiON storage arrays, where performance-optimization work led to two U.S. patents.

Background

B.S. in Computer and Systems Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Two U.S. patents (7,281,097 and 7,739,470) for controlling data-storage performance with genetic and nonlinear control algorithms. Fully remote since 2016, leading distributed teams across time zones with a high-trust, high-autonomy approach. I work across Python, C#, C++, Kotlin, and JavaScript, on AWS and Azure.

What drives me

I’m drawn to the messy, ambiguous situations where the path isn’t obvious yet. I measure my work by what keeps running after I move on: resilient teams and processes that stay strong without me. Getting something working well is valuable. Getting it working well without you is the real win. I care about empowered teams, blameless continuous improvement, and giving people the conditions to do their best work.

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