Matt Black
Director Of Engineering, Core Infrastructure at Canva
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolMatt Black is a seasoned engineering leader with 17 years' experience building cloud-native platforms and scaling infrastructure from startup scrappiness to global enterprise. Currently Director of Engineering, Core Infrastructure at Canva, he focuses on pragmatic, customer-centric delivery to support massive scale (over a billion MAU). His background spans leadership roles in platform, product, and compute at companies like Block, Afterpay and ANZ, blending hands-on DevOps and SRE know-how with product sensibility. A practical coder at heart, he has contributed to notable open-source tooling—improving Packer’s Salt provisioner and refining Python/automation projects—showing attention to code quality and operational automation. Matt is known for turning good teams into great ones by coaching engineers, obsessing over implementation details, and removing friction from delivery. Outside work he’s refreshingly irreverent on GitHub (“for the love of eggs”), hinting at a pragmatic, human approach to engineering.
17 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
BSc Computers for Real Time Systems, BSc Computers for Real Time Systems at University of the West of EnglandADC Physics Maths Design Technology, ADC Physics Maths Design Technology at Alsager School
Stackoverflow
2,750reputation
295kreached
26answers
10questions
flask
top-5%
Github Skills (40)
tuya10
python10
scripting10
riak10
configuration-management10
command-line-interface10
bash10
software-quality10
android-development10
java10
javas10
automation10
script10
go10
saltstack10
Programming languages (24)
Github contributions (5)
rasa/vmware-tools-patches
Mar 2015 - Oct 2017
Patch and build VMware tools automatically
Role in this project:
DevOps Engineer / Automation Engineer
DevOps Engineer / Automation EngineerContributions:7 commits, 6 PRs, 6 comments in 2 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Matt primarily contributed to automating the process of downloading VMware tools by modifying the `download-tools.sh` script. They added and updated URLs for different versions of VMware tools, including newer versions like 8.5.4, 8.5.5, 8.5.6, 10.0.0, and 10.0.1. The user also modified the `compile.sh` script to include the `--force-install` flag, indicating a focus on build and deployment automation.
vmware-tools
vmware-archive/salt-contrib
Oct 2012 - Jul 2013
Salt Module Contributions
Role in this project:Back-end & DevOps Engineer
Back-end & DevOps EngineerContributions:7 commits, 1 comment in 9 months
Contributions summary:Matt primarily contributed to the development and maintenance of Salt modules related to Riak, focusing on automating Riak management tasks. They implemented modules for Riak start, stop, restart, and cluster management. The user also updated the modules to align with Riak 1.3 and 1.4 outputs and implemented a function to check ring readiness.
saltvagrantvcentervmware
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