Matthew Whitehead
Principal Engineer at Kaleido
Greater Southampton Area United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMatthew Whitehead is a Principal Engineer with 11 years of experience building resilient, enterprise-grade distributed systems, currently leading engineering efforts at Kaleido from the Greater Southampton area. He brings deep expertise in messaging and middleware from a long tenure at IBM where he architected core IBM MQ components, client libraries, and protocol support (AMQP 1.0), plus hands-on Java development stretching back to early product releases. Matthew is an active open-source contributor to prominent Hyperledger projects—most notably Hyperledger Besu and FireFly—where he has strengthened blockchain client robustness, peer/consensus handling, and backend API error/status workflows. Known for bridging product strategy with low-level implementation, he combines rigorous protocol knowledge with pragmatic cloud-first design for production systems. An alumnus of the University of Bristol (First Class BSc Computer Science), he often surfaces subtle reliability fixes that prevent large-scale operational issues rather than just delivering visible features.
11 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
BSc (First Class Hons) Computer Science, BSc (First Class Hons) Computer Science at University of Bristol
Stackoverflow
401reputation
13kreached
15answers
2questions
Github Skills (26)
apim10
consensus10
hyperledger-besu10
java10
javas10
go10
api10
ethereum10
blockchain10
error-handling10
api-design9
restful-api9
api-rest9
fabric9
rest-api9
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
hyperledger/besu
May 2023 - Apr 2025
An enterprise-grade Java-based, Apache 2.0 licensed Ethereum client https://wiki.hyperledger.org/display/besu
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:123 reviews, 109 PRs, 44 pushes in 1 year 11 months
Contributions summary:Matthew primarily contributes to the Besu project, a Java-based Ethereum client. Their work focuses on enhancing the client's robustness and functionality, as evidenced by the commits. They've addressed access control issues, improved configuration handling for TOML files, and implemented enhancements related to peer management and consensus mechanisms. The user demonstrates a strong understanding of Java, blockchain technology, and network protocols.
besuhyperledgerlicensedethereump2p
hyperledger/firefly
Sep 2022 - Jan 2023
Hyperledger FireFly is the first open source Supernode: a complete stack for enterprises to build and scale secure Web3 applications. The FireFly API for digital assets, data flows, and blockchain transactions makes it radically faster to build production-ready apps on popular chains and protocols.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:4 releases, 15 reviews, 16 commits in 3 months
Contributions summary:Matthew focused on improving the error handling and status reporting within the Firefly backend system. Their contributions involved modifying error messages, ensuring appropriate HTTP status codes (409), and adding functionality to retrieve operation statuses. The user also refactored blockchain receipt handling and added a query option to the Fabric blockchain connector, demonstrating expertise in blockchain integration and API design. They also worked on the go debugger to listen for debug calls on all interfaces.
dltsupernodeethereumproduction-readyweb3
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.