Sam Matthews
Software Engineering Manager at Read AI
Seattle, Washington, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolSam Matthews is a software engineering manager with 13 years of experience building and scaling mapping and spatial infrastructure, currently leading engineering at Read AI after a technical leadership stint at Mapbox. He specializes in high-throughput HTTP APIs, geographic data pipelines, and reliability engineering for services that handle billions of requests per day. A pragmatic hands-on manager, Sam pairs systems architecture with developer experience—onboarding, docs, and on-call tooling—to help teams ship and operate resilient mapping products. He is an active open-source contributor across major mapping projects (notably mapbox-gl-js and node-mapnik), improving both front-end map interactions and backend robustness through testing and error handling. Based in Seattle and trained in GIS/cartographic design, he brings a rare blend of cartography sensibility and backend performance engineering. Colleagues describe him as someone who makes open source friendlier (and funnier) while keeping critical production services healthy.
12 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
Certificate, GIS/Cartographic Design, Certificate, GIS/Cartographic Design at University of Wisconsin-MadisonUniversity of Iowa
Spanish
Stackoverflow
91reputation
22kreached
8answers
0questions
Github Skills (25)
webgl10
javascript10
mapbox-gl10
testing10
typescript10
ui-design10
uid10
front-end-development10
typescript-types10
maps10
error-handling10
maplibre-gl10
typescripts10
image-processing9
css9
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
mapnik/node-mapnik
Feb 2016 - Jun 2018
Bindings to mapnik for node.js
Role in this project:
Backend Developer & QA Engineer / Test Automation Engineer
Backend Developer & QA Engineer / Test Automation EngineerContributions:142 commits, 30 PRs, 102 pushes in 2 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Sam primarily contributed to improving the stability and reliability of the `node-mapnik` project by writing test cases and implementing error handling. Their work focused on identifying and addressing potential issues related to various image processing functions, including `addImage`, `toGeoJSON`, and vector tile operations. The user's commits reveal a focus on ensuring the library correctly handles invalid input and edge cases, leading to a more robust API. Additionally, the user was involved in testing the rendering and compositing methods for vector tiles.
node-jsnodejsmapnik
mapbox/mapbox-gl-js
Aug 2016 - Dec 2016
Interactive, thoroughly customizable maps in the browser, powered by vector tiles and WebGL
Role in this project:Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:8 commits, 17 PRs, 40 pushes in 3 months
Contributions summary:Sam primarily contributed to the front-end aspects of the `mapbox-gl-js` repository, focusing on user interface elements and map interactions. Their work includes implementing a popup "close" event, refactoring the `queryRenderedFeatures` function with default parameter handling and adding getters for min/max zoom. Additionally, the user updated the documentation for plugins and added a public roadmap page. This work involved modifying JavaScript, CSS, and HTML files.
vector-tilestilesmonorepobrowsermapbox
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