About Me
Hi, I'm Matt — an Architect currently working at CDL Software.
At CDL, I lead initiatives across research and development, solution architecture, and technical strategy, helping customers and internal teams solve complex, high-impact challenges.
I designed and implemented the company’s data strategy, with a strong focus on making our data AI-ready, enabling scalable analytics and intelligent systems across the organisation.
I introduced the AWS Well Architected Framework into our engineering processes and have produced and delivered internal conferences on Well-Architected, AI, AWS DeepRacer, and Developer Experience — driving innovation and a strong culture of learning.
A key area of my work involves exploring technology to create more proactive, personalised, and consumer-friendly insurance experiences.
I also lead our technical engagement with the AWS Partner Network (APN) — working closely with AWS teams to align on roadmap priorities, validate architectures, and accelerate delivery of innovative, cloud-native InsurTech solutions.
Beyond CDL, I’m an AWS Ambassador and AWS Community Builder, and since 2024, I’ve been part of the AWS exam team contributing questions to the AWS Certified Data Engineer exam — helping shape the future of cloud data skills.
I'm also a regular speaker at conferences and meetup groups around the world, including AWS re:Invent, ElasticON, and QlikWorld, where I share knowledge on cloud architecture, AI, data, and developer enablement.
In 2023, I was honoured with the AWS Gold Jacket and recognised as an AWS Certification All Star for achieving all AWS certifications.
From 2021 to 2024, I was named a Qlik Global Luminary, recognised for delivering measurable impact through data and contributing to the global analytics community.
Awards
The AWS Ambassador Program builds a community of highly qualified and influential employees at AWS Partners. AWS Ambassadors are recognized as influential AWS professionals in driving their organization's AWS proficiency and supporting the community through thought leadership.
AWS Community Builders are AWS technical enthusiasts and emerging thought leaders who are passionate about sharing knowledge and connecting with the technical community.
The 'Golden Jacket' is awarded to AWS Ambassadors after passing all of the AWS certifications. I received mine in 2023 and have continued to maintain full AWS certification status.
The Qlik Luminary Program celebrates the brightest beacons from across the Qlik and Talend global ecosystem. Luminaries represent Qlik's top customer advocates and counsellors who are driving measurable impacts from data – and then broadly sharing those outcomes with others. With passion, expertise, and commitment, Qlik Luminaries champion the vision of transforming data into business transformations.
An AWS Exam SME (Subject Matter Expert) is someone who contributes to the design, development, review, and validation of AWS certification exams. It’s a key role in ensuring AWS certifications are relevant, fair, and aligned with real-world practices.
I am part of the team writing the questions for the Data Engineer Associate Exam
AWS Partner Network (APN) partner designations are official recognitions awarded by AWS to partners that meet specific criteria across technical proficiency, customer success, and specialization. These designations help customers identify trusted partners for specific use cases or industries.
Financial Services Competency, Private Link Service Ready Launch Partner, RDS Service Ready Launch Partner, Qualified Software
Certifications
I hold certifications from AWS, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, DAMA, Scrum.org, Hashicorp, Okta, Qlik, Linux Foundation, ISC2, GitLab, ITIL and Pendo.
View my verified certifications and badges on Credly.
Conference Talk Highlights
Ensure the security and reliability of your GenAI workloads with Amazon Bedrock
AWS re:Invent 2024 re:Cap
Activities
| Activity | Date | Location | Link | Year |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Let's Talk About Data Show | 18th August 2025 | AWS Live Stream | 2025 | |
| AWS Manchester User Group | 30th July 2025 | Manchester, UK | Talk at Meetup | 2025 |
| AWS PartnerCast - GenAI Partner Series - Ensure Security and Reliability of Gen AI Workloads with Amazon Bedrock | 17th July 2025 | Webinar | 2025 | |
| Trying Kiro : Amazon’s New AI Powered IDE | 14th July 2025 | Blog | 2025 | |
| Managing Compliance With AWS Backup Part 2 | 14th July 2025 | Blog | 2025 | |
| Managing Compliance With AWS Backup Part 1 | 6th July 2025 | Blog | 2025 | |
| AWS DeepRacer Event Organiser / Track Boss | 26th June 2025 | CDL, Stockport, UK | 2025 | |
| AWS Summit Washington DC - DEV205 - Ensure the security and reliability of your AI workloads with Bedrock. | 10th-11th June 2025 | Washington DC, USA | Conference Talk | 2025 |
| AWS Summit Stockholm - COM201 - Ensure security and reliability of GenAI workloads with Amazon Bedrock | 4th June 2025 | Stockholm, Sweden | Conference Talk | 2025 |
| AWS Stockholm User Group - AI Coding Assistants in Practice: CDL’s Journey with Amazon Q Developer | 3rd June 2025 | Stockholm, Sweden | Talk at Meetup | 2025 |
| AWS Lancashire User Group | 22nd May 2025 | Chorley, UK | Talk at Meetup | 2025 |
| CI CD for Bedrock Evaluations | 12th May 2025 | Blog | 2025 | |
| AWS Exam Writing - Data Engineer Associate | 29th April - 1st May 2025 | Seattle, USA | 2025 | |
| AWS York User Group | 24th April 2025 | York, UK | Talk at Meetup | 2025 |
| AWS Edinburgh User Group | 2nd April 2025 | Edinburgh, UK | Talk at Meetup | 2025 |
| Ensure the security and reliability of your GenAI workloads with Amazon Bedrock | 26th February 2025 | YouTube | 2025 | |
| AWS re:Invent re:Cap | 29th January 2025 | Manchester, UK | Conference Talk | 2025 |
| AWS Community Day Belfast 2024 | 10th December 2024 | YouTube | 2024 | |
| DevOps Society Manchester | 10th December 2024 | YouTube | 2024 | |
| AWS re:Invent Demo at reinvent modern applications and open-source zone. Data driven well architected. | 4th December 2024 | Las Vegas, USA | 2024 | |
| AWS re:Invent Demo at reinvent modern applications and open-source zone. PostgeSQL Fast Refresh Materialized Views | 4th December 2024 | Las Vegas, USA | 2024 | |
| AWS re:Invent PeerTalk PTM107-R2 - Enhancing developer productivity with AI-powered tools. | 3rd December 2024 | Las Vegas, USA | 2024 | |
| AWS re:Invent PeerTalk PTM114-R1 - Modernizing data architectures | 2nd December 2024 | Las Vegas, USA | 2024 | |
| DevOps Society Manchester | 28th November 2024 | Manchester, UK | Talk at Meetup | 2024 |
| Data Driven Well Architected | 14th October 2024 | YouTube | 2024 | |
| AWS Community Summit | 27th September 2024 | Manchester, UK | Conference Talk | 2024 |
| Ran AWS Belfast Community Day DeepRacer Event | 6th September 2024 | Belfast, Northern Ireland | 2024 | |
| AWS Belfast Community Day Database Migration Talk | 6th September 2024 | Belfast, Northern Ireland | Conference Talk | 2024 |
| Talk at AWS Summit New York. Session code DEV203 - Data Driven Well Architected | 10th July 2024 | New York City, USA | Conference Talk | 2024 |
| Data empowered futures for all | 27th June 2024 | Stockport, UK | Conference Talk | 2024 |
| Scaling AI Education with AWS DeepRacer | 14th June 2024 | YouTube | 2024 | |
| AWS Sheffield User Group | 13th June 2024 | Sheffield, UK | Talk at Meetup | 2024 |
| Using the Well Architected Tool to drive improvements in software development | 11th June 2024 | YouTube | 2024 | |
| AWS Developers Podcast recorded at Stockholm Summit | 7th June 2024 | Stockholm, Sweden | Podcast | 2024 |
| Ambassador EMEA Summit Lightening talk on data driven well architected. | 5th June 2024 | Stockholm, Sweden | Conference Talk | 2024 |
| AWS User Group Stockholm | 3rd June 2024 | Stockholm, Sweden | Talk at Meetup | 2024 |
| AWS User Group North East | 14th May 2024 | Newcastle, UK | Talk at Meetup | 2024 |
| Let's Talk About Data (AWS Twitch) | 10th April 2024 | AWS | 2024 | |
| Awarded Qlik Luminary For 2024 | 14th February 2024 | Qlik | 2024 | |
| AWS re:Invent re:Cap | 9th February 2024 | London, UK | Register | 2024 |
| AWS re:Invent re:Cap | 8th February 2024 | London, UK | Register | 2024 |
| Using Snowflake data hosted in GCP with AWS Glue | 29th January 2024 | Blog | 2024 | |
| AWS re:Invent re:Cap | 18th January 2024 | Manchester, UK | Register | 2024 |
| Comsum re:Invent Roving Reporter AWS DeepRacer | 29th November 2023 | Las Vegas, NV | YouTube | 2023 |
| Comsum re:Invent Roving Reporter Interview with Phil Horn | 27th November 2023 | Las Vegas, NV | YouTube | 2023 |
| AWS re:Invent: Co-Presented: Data patterns: Get the big picture for data applications (PEX309) | 27th November 2023 | Las Vegas, NV | YouTube | 2023 |
| Migrating 600 databases to AWS: better, faster, cheaper | 21st November 2023 | 2023 | ||
| How Change Data Capture Cuts Costs and Modernises Applications in a Competitive Market | 17th November 2023 | Qlik Blog | 2023 | |
| Amazon PartyRock Launch | 16th November 2023 | 2023 | ||
| Qlik Luminary Meetup | 9th November 2023 | Lund, Sweden | 2023 | |
| Amazon QuickSight Customer Advisory Board | 7th November 2023 | Madrid, Spain | 2023 | |
| Using AWS DeepRacer to scale ML education Manchester Web Meetup |
26th October 2023 | Manchester, UK | Talk at Meetup | 2023 |
| AWS Ambassador Global Summit | 19th - 20th September 2023 | Seattle | Event Page | 2023 |
| AWS 'Gold Jacket' AWS Ambassador Certification All-Star |
20th September 2023 | Seattle | AWS Blog | 2023 |
| Scaling Well Architected with Custom Lenses AWS Ambassador Global Summit |
20th September 2023 | Seattle | YouTube | 2023 |
| Scaling ML Education with AWS DeepRacer | 30th August 2023 | Blog | 2023 | |
| How Change Data Capture Cuts Costs and Modernises Applications in a Competitive Market | 15th August 2023 | Article | 2023 | |
| CDL DeepRacer Championship (Organiser) | 13th July 2023 | Stockport, UK | 2023 | |
| Advanced Monitoring for Amazon RDS AWS (4D) Data Deep Dive Day Manchester |
16th June 2023 | Manchester, UK | Event Page | 2023 |
| Migrating 600 databases to AWS: better, faster, cheaper (CMY204) - AWS Summit London | 7th June 2023 | London, UK | 2023 | |
| Business transformation using Qlik Replicate Change Data Capture - Gartner Data and Analytics Summit | 23rd - 24th May 2023 | London, UK | Event Page | 2023 |
| Interview with Ian Moyse at Qlik World 2023 | 19th April 2023 | Las Vegas, NV | 2023 | |
| Let's Talk About Data Twitch Stream Migrating 600 DB's from Oracle to RDS PostgreSQL |
26th April 2023 | Twitch | 2023 | |
| InsurTechX: How CDL is Revolutionizing Retail Insurance Tech Talks Daily Podcast with Neil C Hughes |
20th April 2023 | Las Vegas, NV | Spotify | 2023 |
| Turning Transactions into Insights and Triggers Qlik World 2023 |
19th April 2023 | Las Vegas, NV | 2023 | |
| AWS ComSum Quarterly Guest Editor | 14th April 2023 | Article | 2023 | |
| Migrating 600 databases to AWS: better, faster, cheaper AWS UK User Group |
22nd February 2023 | London, UK | YouTube | 2023 |
| Qlik Luminary 50 2023 | 21st February 2023 | Article | 2023 | |
| AWS Database User Group: Migrating 600 Databases to AWS | 16th December 2022 | London, UK | 2022 | |
| AWS re:Invent 2022: Migrating 600 Databases to AWS (COM311) | 1st December 2022 | Las Vegas, NV | YouTube | 2022 |
| SSL For RDS With Glue Python Job and AWS SDK For Pandas | 6th November 2022 | Blog | 2022 | |
| AWS ComSum: Migrating 600 Databases to AWS | 22nd September 2022 | Manchester, UK | YouTube | 2022 |
| Big Data Manchester: How to get AWS certified … and why bother? | 9th August 2022 | Manchester, UK | Talk at Meetup | 2022 |
| Qlik Partner Event Reading | 19th July 2022 | Reading, UK | 2022 | |
| Using Athena Views as a source in AWS Glue | 16th February 2022 | Blog | 2022 | |
| AWS ComSum re:Invent 2021 Live Stream | 3rd December 2021 | Las Vegas, NV | YouTube | 2021 |
| AWS ComSum Pundit Picks re:Invent 2021 | 22nd November 2021 | YouTube | 2021 | |
| Big Data London 2021: Turning transactions into insights and triggers | 28th October 2021 | London, UK | YouTube | 2021 |
| The Data Pubcast: What is a data product? | 25th July 2021 | Podcast | 2021 | |
| Qlik Luminary 2021 | 13th April 2021 | Qlik Blog | 2021 | |
| What's New in ML? re:Invent ML Keynote | 8th December 2020 | Blog | 2020 | |
| re:Invent Week 2: Data Sessions | 7th December 2020 | Blog | 2020 | |
| Whats New In Data: re:invent Andy Jassy Keynote | 1st December 2020 | Blog | 2020 | |
| re:Invent: Data Sessions Week 1 | 29th November 2020 | Blog | 2020 | |
| Unify data silos with AWS AppSync | 24th November 2020 | Blog | 2020 | |
| New Mac Config | 14th November 2020 | Blog | 2020 | |
| Amazon RDS Service Ready | 5th May 2020 | Blog | 2020 | |
| Stoke On Tech: Decouple Storage from Compute - Put Data In The Hands of Decision Makers | 27th February 2020 | Stoke, UK | Talk at Meetup | 2020 |
| Elastic User Group Manchester (Organiser) | 30th January 2020 | Manchester, UK | Talk at Meetup | 2020 |
| AWS Lambda PostgreSQL Client | 26th January 2020 | Blog | 2020 | |
| Big Data London: Decouple Storage From Compute – Put Data In The Hands Of Decision Makers | 19th December 2019 | London, UK | YouTube | 2019 |
| Combating Fraud and Providing Customer Insights In Real Time | 23rd October 2019 | YouTube | 2019 | |
| AWS User Group Manchester: Combating Fraud and Providing Customer Insights In Real Time | 26th September 2019 | Manchester, UK | Talk at Meetup | 2019 |
| HACKATHON! 'Miles Of Smiles' with Code Nation and CDL (Organiser) | 7th September 2019 | Manchester, UK | Hackathon | 2019 |
| Elastic User Group Manchester: How CDL developed a real-time data intelligence platform with the Elastic Stack | 5th September 2019 | Manchester, UK | Talk at Meetup | 2019 |
| AWS User Group North East: Learn how CDL processes vast amounts of data in milliseconds. | 31st July 2019 | Newcastle, UK |
Talk at Meetup | 2019 |
| AWS PrivateLink Service Ready |
24th July 2019 | Blog | 2019 | |
| Attunity LIVE London 2019: Turning transactions into insights | 11th July 2019 | London, UK | 2019 | |
| How CDL developed a real-time data intelligence platform with the Elastic Stack | 25th June 2019 | Elastic | 2019 | |
| CDL: Visualising the power of data with Canvas and Elasticsearch | 29th May 2019 | Elastic Blog | 2019 | |
| AWS User Group Edinburgh: Combating Fraud and Providing Customer Insights In Real Time | 24th April 2019 |
Edinburgh, UK | Talk at Meetup | 2019 |
| Nest Hello UK Setup | 8th April 2019 | Blog | 2019 | |
| AWS User Group Leeds: Combating Fraud and Providing Customer Insights In Real Time | 7th March 2019 | Leeds, UK | Talk at Meetup | 2019 |
| Northern Data Forum: How CDL have used Elastic Search and streaming capabilities to provide ML on the fly, in the hands of the insurance broker. | 4th December 2018 | Leeds, UK | Talk at Meetup | 2018 |
| Getting Started with AWS Managed Streaming for Kafka Service (MSK) | 29th November 2018 | Blog | 2018 | |
| Elastic London User Group: Serving 25 million daily requests in sub 100ms response times with Elasticsearch | 27th November 2018 | London, UK | Talk at Meetup | 2018 |
| Digital North: What's Next In Tech? | 22nd November 2018 | Manchester, UK | Talk at Meetup | 2018 |
| Using the NetApp Unified Manager REST API to send metrics to Elastic Stack | 19th October 2018 | Blog | 2018 | |
| Digital North: What Went Wrong? Overcoming problems in a digital world. | 13th September 2018 | Manchester, UK | Talk at Meetup | 2018 |
| Using the Attunity AEM REST API to send metrics to Elastic Stack | 11th September 2018 | Blog | 2018 | |
| Lancashire Tech Talks: Game Day Testing | 18th April 2018 | Blackburn, UK | Talk at Meetup | 2018 |
| ElasticON 2017 | 22nd June 2017 | London, UK | Elastic | 2017 |
| Manchester Digital Talk |
15th February 2017 | Manchester, UK | 2017 | |
| Guest Lecture: modern data architecture Manchester Metropolitan University |
2nd February 2017 | Manchester, UK | 2017 | |
| Manchester Elastic User Group: Enabling the UK insurance market to enrich client data in real time |
24th November 2016 | Manchester, UK | Talk at Meetup | 2017 |
| If you don’t have auditing do you really care about your database? | 9th October 2016 | Blog | 2016 | |
| Blackout Thinks It’s Still Active | 27th June 2016 | Blog | 2016 | |
| Metric Extension Information | 13th June 2016 | Blog | 2016 | |
| UK Oracle Application Express (APEX) Meetup | 23rd March 2016 | Leeds, UK | Talk at Meetup | 2016 |
| Netapp SMO ‘Fake’ Running Backups Prevent Profile Changes | 20th January 2016 | Blog | 2016 | |
| Database Patch Info From OEM | 15th December 2015 | Blog | 2015 | |
| TNS-01189 IN SCAN LISTENER LOG | 1st December 2015 | Blog | 2015 | |
| Oracle VM Target Monitoring in OEM | 13th November 2015 | Blog | 2015 |