Matt Woodley

I build things. My professional career was sparked by a grade 10 telecommunications class where by the end of the term I was basically teaching the teacher programming. I spent the rest of high school doing random side projects, like an interactive 3D model of stars rendered using pure math calculations and quaternions, to a web-scraping of tsn.ca that automatically tracked stats for my Dad's hockey pool (this was ~2003 - I learned the hard way how fragile scraping websites could be).

From the moment I started at the Univeristy of Waterloo in Software Engineering in 2005, I've been extremely fortunate to have had a career that was practically on auto-pilot, with the great fortune of living through one of the most lucrative periods to be a software engineer. It afforded me the opportunity to do co-ops at world class companies across North America, like Qualcomm in San Diego, Arista Networks (a small startup in a basement office back then) in the bay area, and Amazon in Seattle.

After University, my desire to stay in Canada led me to a job at a local networking device company in Waterloo. However, after less than a year there, I got the itch to do something bigger and better and was offered the chance to work on a top-secret device project for Amazon in Seattle. I signed the deal thinking that perhaps it would be for working on an Amazon tablet, however, it turned out to be the ground floor of the infamous Fire Phone, with the first Fire Tablet launching a few months after I joined.

It was one hell of a ride working on the Fire Phone, our product managers frequently presented our work to Jeff Bezos, and there were some tense crunches over the years. Shortly after launch, I decided to take a couple months off, travel all over southeast Asia, and moved back to Canada in 2015, through an internal transfer to the Amazon Fulfillment team working on picking software. After a fun year launching the first Kiva Robot picking site outside of the USA in Poland, I took an opportunity to transfer again within Amazon on a greenfield project in Customer Service automating workforce management solutions. I remained in Customer Service for the next 10 years, with a couple more team shifts along the way - one with the internal Ordering and Account website, and my final stint with the contact center management team, reponsible for routing and connecting customers with support associates across all contact channels.

2026 is the first time in nearly 15 years that I no longer carry the label of "Amazonian" (or as the locals in SLU used to refer to some of us, "Amholes") and am looking for that next big thing to tickle my fancy.