Matt Clay
Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat
Hillsboro, Oregon, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMatt Clay is a Principal Software Engineer with 15 years of experience in DevOps, backend and systems engineering, currently based in Hillsboro, Oregon and leading scalable infrastructure work at Red Hat. He has a strong track record improving CI/CD, test automation, and build systems across high-profile open-source projects like Ansible and its Azure collection, driving Python 3 compatibility, integration tests, and safer execution patterns. Previously a software architect at Earth Class Mail, he combines deep operational experience with hands-on coding—fixing subtle bugs, refactoring for security, and adding features that improve real-world reliability. Comfortable across full-stack concerns, he’s contributed to language tooling too (Script#), showing an appetite for cross-platform interoperability and runtime parity. Colleagues know him for improving developer workflows and quietly raising code quality through better testing, automation, and tooling.
14 years of coding experience
18 years of employment as a software developer
Portland Community College
English
Stackoverflow
1reputation
29reached
0answers
1question
Github Skills (36)
shellcheck10
docker10
javascript10
python10
ansible-collections10
testing10
net10
dotnet10
bash10
microsoft-azure10
dockers10
cicd10
asp-net10
automation10
automation-testing10
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
ansible/ansible
Sep 2014 - Jan 2023
Ansible is a radically simple IT automation platform that makes your applications and systems easier to deploy and maintain. Automate everything from code deployment to network configuration to cloud management, in a language that approaches plain English, using SSH, with no agents to install on remote systems. https://docs.ansible.com.
Role in this project:
DevOps Engineer
DevOps EngineerContributions:14 releases, 1191 reviews, 3237 commits in 8 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Matt primarily contributed to improving the build processes for Ansible by fixing issues in the installation of dependencies within collection tests and improving code coverage. Their work focused on enhancing the test environment for Ansible projects, particularly for Python-based aspects. The user also made several code-related improvements, including cleaning up the code base for performance improvements.
everythingpythonit-automationdevopsdeployment
ansible/ansible-modules-core
Jun 2015 - Feb 2017
Ansible modules - these modules ship with ansible
Role in this project:Back-end & DevOps Engineer
Back-end & DevOps EngineerContributions:11 commits, 72 PRs, 36 pushes in 1 year 7 months
Contributions summary:Matt contributed to the Ansible modules core repository, primarily focusing on improving the modules' functionality and robustness. Their work involved adding features to existing modules, such as the filename option for the apt_repository module, and addressing issues like Python 3 compatibility and check mode behavior across various modules. They also made changes to improve code quality and security by splitting shell commands and refactoring code to avoid the use of `use_unsafe_shell`. Additionally, the user added initial support for module integration tests.
ansibleshipansible-modules
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