Matthew Fontana
Staff Engineer · Airbnb13 yrs in enterprise softwareHoboken, NJ
About

Hi, I'm Matthew Fontana.

I build agentic developer platforms inside large engineering orgs, write about the work here, and take on a few outside engagements a year.

I'm a Staff Software Engineer at Airbnb on the Data Management team. Most recently I shipped an internal AI agent for natural-language search and discovery across the data warehouse. It's a Claude Code Marketplace plugin with skills, subagents, hooks, and commands. CLI and API MCP servers behind it handle internal authentication and authorization. An evaluation framework scores business outcomes, not unit pass rates. Earlier on the team I built batch and real-time ingestion for column-level data lineage across the warehouse and designed the Lineage API behind multi-step traversal queries.

Before Airbnb I spent seven years at Spotify. I left as Staff in Productivity Engineering and Chairman of the Technical Steering Group. Six teams under me covered developer tooling, identity, and employee lifecycle. We cut non-business-focused dev cycles by 30%, and the six engineers I mentored into tech-leadership roles all got promoted within two years. Earlier in that run I introduced Spring Boot to Spotify's backend, ran GDPR work inside the data engineering org, and built the GDPR-compliant audit system for the Spotify-for-Artists two-sided marketplace.

Before Spotify, four years at UPS shipping Spring Cloud, OpenShift, and lambda-architecture streaming systems on top of the JVM. That's where the platform-engineering instinct started: the work that pays off is rarely the work in the ticket. It's the layer underneath.

I've also run TabletopAdventureCreator.com since 2022. It's a generative-AI SaaS I built and still ship solo. Evidence that I was building production AI products before the current AI wave.

The work behind the writing

The platform I write about here is the platform I'm shipping in production every week.

What I work on

Four areas the work tends to land in. They overlap more than they don't.

Agentic developer platforms

Skills, subagents, hooks, slash commands, and the eval harnesses that keep them honest in production. Your team adopts the platform without having to own every primitive.

MCP servers and provider-portable routing

CLI and API MCP servers that expose your codebase, data, and internal services to AI agents under existing AuthN/AuthZ. LiteLLM-style routing keeps the platform portable across Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and self-hosted models, so the work survives the next provider launch.

Developer productivity at org scale

As chair of Spotify's Productivity Engineering steering group, I turned scattered tooling into a measurable platform that engineering leaders can defend to the business.

The standard everyone ends up adopting

Pattern across three employers: I introduce the platform layer (Spring Boot at Spotify, OpenShift at UPS, Claude Code plugin at Airbnb) and it propagates because it earns adoption, not because it's mandated.

Experience

Roles, employers, years. The rest is in the bio above.

  1. Staff Software Engineer, Data Management · Airbnb

    2024 – present

    Productionized an internal AI agent for natural-language search and discovery across the data warehouse. Claude Code Marketplace plugin combining skills, subagents, hooks, and commands. CLI + API MCP servers with internal AuthN/AuthZ. Evaluation framework that scores business outcomes, not unit pass rates.

  2. Founder · TabletopAdventureCreator.comFounder track

    2022 – present

    Solo-built generative-AI SaaS for tabletop RPG adventure creation. In production since 2022, before the current generative AI wave.

  3. Staff Software Engineer, Productivity Engineering · Spotify

    2022 – 2024

    Chairman of the Productivity Engineering Technical Steering Group. Led six teams across developer tooling, IAM, and employee lifecycle. Reduced non-business-focused dev cycles by 30%.

  4. Senior Software Engineer, Spotify for Artists · Spotify

    2020 – 2022

    Two-sided marketplace work: GDPR audit system for artists, labels, and distributors. Payment provider scaling. Instructor for the internal data-science bootcamp.

  5. Data Engineer · Spotify

    2017 – 2020

    Introduced Spring Boot to Spotify's backend. GDPR compliance on GCP BigQuery. Co-founded a Google + Spotify Special Interest Group.

  6. Associate → Senior Application Developer · UPS

    2013 – 2017

    JVM platform work. Introduced OpenShift to enable microservices. Spring Cloud, AXON event sourcing, lambda-architecture streaming on Cassandra/Solr/Spark, JBoss Fuse / Camel / ActiveMQ.

  7. B.S., Information Technology · NJIT

    2009 – 2013

    New Jersey Institute of Technology.

Selected public work

Don't take the resume on faith. Click in.

Tabletop Adventure Creator

Solo-built generative-AI SaaS for tabletop RPG adventure creation. Live since 2022, before the current AI wave.

Visit the product

@Mandalorian007 on GitHub

Public repos including aitk (the portable AI CLI toolkit), claude-code-toolkit, claude-tmux-manager, and other Claude Code tooling.

Browse the repos

The Agentic Engineer blog

Field notes from the consulting work and from inside production engineering. Patterns, tooling, lessons learned. Published weekly.

Read the blog

Get in touch

Email is the fastest way to reach me. Glad to hear from anyone building in this space.