Matt Baker
Principal Software Engineer at Panthalassa
Portland, Oregon, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMatt Baker is a Principal Software Engineer based in Portland, Oregon, with nearly two decades of experience building high-throughput, fault-tolerant distributed systems and APIs. He architects and operates mission-critical services—most recently the Elixir GraphQL API Gateway at New Relic that handled 800k requests per minute with multiple 9s of reliability—and brings deep Elixir and Ruby expertise as a pragmatic polyglot. Matt combines hands-on implementation (concurrency caps, auditing, query rewriters) with cross-team architectural leadership, change design, and mentoring that grows engineers into technical leaders. He’s contributed to the elixir-ls language server, adding reference and symbol providers and improving umbrella app support, reflecting a commitment to developer tooling and language ecosystems. Known for building healthy, high-retention teams, he emphasizes psychological safety, open collaboration, and long-term stability over short-term fixes. Equally comfortable diving into unfamiliar problem spaces or drafting multi-team roadmaps, he blends technical rigor with a people-first leadership style.
16 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (BS) Computer Science Journalism, Bachelor of Science (BS) Computer Science Journalism at Knox College
Spanish, English
Stackoverflow
3,734reputation
620kreached
30answers
2questions
md5
top-1%
javascript
top-5%
Github Skills (14)
md510
language-server-protocol10
elixir-mix10
elixir10
code-analysis9
javascript9
testing7
floating-point6
server-side-javascript6
jquery6
python6
weak-references6
django6
java6
Programming languages (18)
Github contributions (5)
JakeBecker/elixir-ls
Feb 2018 - Mar 2018
A frontend-independent IDE "smartness" server for Elixir. Implements the JSON-based "Language Server Protocol" standard and provides debugger support via VS Code's debugger protocol.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:11 commits, 3 PRs, 27 comments in 6 days
Contributions summary:Matt primarily focused on enhancing the Elixir language server for the `elixir-ls` repository. Their contributions included implementing a "references" provider, enabling the ability to find references to functions and atoms within Elixir code. They also added a document symbol provider and improved the overall reliability of the reference feature, including umbrella application support. Furthermore, the user incorporated the `elixirsense` library to leverage advanced code analysis capabilities.
vscodevscode-extensionindependentelixirvs-code
mattbaker/pipboy-explorations
Nov 2015 - Dec 2015
Contributions:41 commits, 5 PRs, 27 pushes in 13 days
int
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