Matt Lord
Principal Software Engineer at PlanetScale
New York, New York, United States
Summary
🤩
RockstarMatt Lord is a Principal Software Engineer based in New York with deep expertise in databases, UNIX/Linux, and distributed systems, currently driving Vitess and database platform work at PlanetScale and as a Vitess project maintainer for the CNCF. He has a decades-long career spanning hands-on engineering, product management, and support across MySQL, Oracle, MongoDB, Etsy, and SRE/storage roles at WeWork, giving him rare visibility into both developer-facing products and large-scale operational requirements. Known for curiosity and self-driven problem solving, he pairs systems-level thinking with practical implementation, shipping resilient infrastructure and database tooling. Matt is an active technical communicator—authoring blogs for MongoDB, MySQL, and Oracle and speaking about distributed databases—so his work influences both code and community. An often-overlooked strength is his background in support and training, which sharpens his ability to simplify complex features for real-world users and debug production incidents efficiently.
1 year of coding experience
29 years of employment as a software developer
Github Skills (11)
clustering10
mysql9
database9
scaling9
sql9
scale9
kubernetes9
database-cluster8
vitess8
tidb8
horizontal-scaling8
Programming languages (1)
Github contributions (1)
vitessio/vitess
Mar 2025 - Mar 2025
Vitess is a database clustering system for horizontal scaling of MySQL.
Contributions:2 reviews in 14 days
mysqltidbhorizontal-scalingsqlvitess
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.