Lafayette, Louisiana · Remote · me@matthewturland.com
matthewturland.com · linkedin.com/in/matthew-turland · github.com/elazar
Senior software engineer specializing in backend systems, distributed integrations, reliability, and developer infrastructure. Experienced in taking complex systems from architecture through production operation, with particular depth in PHP, APIs, asynchronous processing, and third-party integrations. Technical author, speaker, mentor, and open-source contributor.
- Languages: PHP, TypeScript, JavaScript / Node.js, Python, SQL
- Backend & APIs: REST, OpenAPI, GraphQL, Laravel, Symfony, Express
- Data: MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis / Valkey, Elasticsearch / OpenSearch, MongoDB
- Infrastructure: AWS, Docker / Podman, Terraform, Ansible, PyInfra, CI / CD
- Testing: TDD, PHPUnit, Pest, Vitest, Jest, Cypress, Playwright
- Distributed Systems: asynchronous processing, background workers, API rate limiting, observability
- AI Engineering: LLMs, MCP, Claude Code, agent skills, AI-assisted development, semantic knowledge systems, agent tooling
Senior Software Development Engineer · 2024–Present · Remote
Senior Full Stack Engineer · 2023–2024 · Remote
- Designed and implemented integration with a GraphQL API exposing CSM and Sales Rep assignment data for synchronization across approximately 117K accounts.
- Owned architectural and operational concerns across Zillow and Follow Up Boss integrations, including authentication, deduplication, asynchronous processing, rate limiting, monitoring, and evolving API contracts.
- Created a PSR-7 implementation for the Lithium framework and integrated opt-in OpenAPI contract validation, benchmarking schema-caching approaches and controller-level automated tests.
- Helped establish systematic API contract enforcement across multiple Zillow systems, shifting detection of integration failures toward system boundaries rather than downstream failures.
- Created a PHP static- and taint-analysis tool integrating Z3 and Psalm with CLI and MCP interfaces that produced analyses identifying security vulnerabilities including CRLF injection and authority-relative URL bypass.
- Created a semantic knowledge lattice capturing engineering invariants, failure modes, and operational gotchas for AI-agent context injection, establishing it as shared team infrastructure.
- Created a Python-based Claude Code plugin that controls which tools and actions an AI coding agent can execute, enforcing engineering policies at runtime.
- Developed and published over 20 AI agent skills through an internal marketplace and authored FUB's primary AI engineering guide, helping establish shared practices for AI-assisted development.
- Provide technical leadership through architecture, design and code reviews, mentoring, and cross-team engineering standards without formal people-management responsibility.
Software Engineer · 2022 · Remote
- Maintained and extended multi-tenant asset-management services using TypeScript, PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch / OpenSearch, and AWS.
- Led development of authentication and image-hosting / transformation services using Okta, TypeScript, S3, and CloudFront.
- Improved Docker-based local development and helped codify AWS infrastructure with Terraform.
Senior Software Engineer / Team Lead · 2020–2022 · Remote
- Led development across PHP / Laravel, PHP / Slim, Node / Express, Python / Flask, MongoDB, OpenAPI, and third-party integrations.
- Mentored a software engineering intern whose work contributed substantially to React and PHP codebases and engineering documentation.
- Established project creation, acceptance, deployment, and documentation practices used across the team.
Software Engineer III · 2018–2020 · Remote
- Maintained a PHP / Slim monolith alongside Node / PostgreSQL microservices.
- Developed Docker-based local development infrastructure and an end-to-end test suite using Cypress and Cucumber.
Senior Full Stack Engineer · 2017–2018 · Remote
Full Stack Engineer · 2015–2017 · Remote
- Led extraction of third-party integrations from a legacy PHP application into a Symfony microservice backed by DynamoDB and SQS.
- Developed the Equip architecture-decision framework and supporting libraries.
- Participated in migration from PHP 5 / HHVM and legacy frameworks to PHP 7, Symfony, React, and Redux.
Blopboard — Senior Engineer · 2013–2015 · Remote PHP microservices and background workers using SQS / Resque, Redis, MySQL, and Elasticsearch; AWS logging and deployment infrastructure.
Synacor — Principal Engineer / Senior Engineer · 2010–2013 · Remote Distributed services and advertising systems using Java, PHP, RabbitMQ, MySQL, REST APIs, and JavaScript; frontend / service architecture and engineering documentation.
Additional experience: K-fx2 (2010) · php[architect] (2009-2010) · Blue Parabola (2008-2010) · surgiSYS (2008) · Zend Technologies (2007) · METHODS Technology Solutions (2006-2008) · Acadiana Educational Endowment (2005-2006) · Firefly Digital (2002-2005) · Gannett (2001-2002)
- PyInfra OrbStack Connector — Author and maintainer of a Python connector integrating PyInfra infrastructure automation with OrbStack VM and container management.
- Flystream — Author of a PHP stream wrapper integrating Flysystem with native PHP filesystem functions.
- League CommonMark Obsidian Extension — Author of a PHP extension for rendering Obsidian-specific Markdown elements through League CommonMark.
- Asynchronous PHP — Creator and maintainer of a curated technical resource covering concepts, projects, libraries, and people involved in asynchronous PHP programming.
- Other Contributions: PHP core, Symfony, Composer, Psalm, Flysystem, PHP League OpenAPI PSR-7 Validator
- Author: Web Scraping with PHP, 2nd Edition (2019); PHP Master: Write Cutting-Edge Code (2011); php[architect]'s Guide to Web Scraping with PHP (2010).
- Speaker: 20+ technical presentations and workshops covering software engineering, PHP, APIs, Redis, testing, web scraping, object-oriented programming, and developer effectiveness.
- University of Louisiana at Lafayette — Computer Science
- Zend Framework Zend Certified Engineer — 2008