Matthew Summers, Brimley Labs
Engineer and CTO from Fortune 500 companies to startups taken through exits. The recent years have been AI: custom models, agent pipelines with guardrails, and deployment at real scale. I work directly in your systems, quote fixed prices, and demo finished work every day.
Routing engines, AI pipelines, traffic integrity, newsletters at scale, and the cost cuts that paid for them.
Case studiesVP at Kaplan, award-winning CTO at Mindprint, agency CTO, fractional CTO, and now the Guild.
TimelineBrim brings semantic search to Laravel with no API keys. trovedb is an operator console for SQL databases.
RepositoriesPython, PHP and SQL at expert level, AI and agents, cloud and operations, and the business platforms small companies run on.
Full listSelected work
Client names stay private. The results do not.
Brought Agile delivery to a 200-person engineering organisation at a global education company, consolidated platforms, and won approval for a multimillion-dollar next-generation learning platform. Open Education Consortium award, 2015.
Took a consumer learning product to a B2B platform as CTO. Multi-tenant, assessment-driven, built on a lean stack. SIIA CODiE 2018, Reimagine Education Gold 2018, Harvard New Venture Competition finalist.
For the client portfolio of a large digital agency: training pipelines, retrieval over client data, agents with explicit guardrails, evaluation suites, and cost and latency budgets. Deployed into logistics, finance, legal, scientific and security domains.
Custom RV-aware routing on a self-hosted engine, offline map tiles, and a curated dataset of 78,000 campgrounds and 150,000 fuel stops. Web and native mobile, built with agentic tools under human review.
Edge and origin detection of invalid traffic across an estate of sites, with real-time gating of advertising, vendor reputation feeds, and daily reporting to the people who sell the ads.
Collects sources, extracts and writes, assembles the digest, and pushes to the email platform, with editorial review built into every stage. Runs daily for a media company.
Sky conditions and targets for smart-telescope owners: 35,000 location pages in seven languages, light-pollution data, a free course, and a companion app. Built and shipped by one person with an agent.
CTO and lead engineer at Kaango in Denver, from the first commit to the acquisition by Hearst in 2007.
Experience
Founded an invitation-only collective of senior engineers who build with agentic tools for small businesses. I qualify every client personally, set the standards every member signs, and built the platform the Guild runs on.
Hands-on engineering and AI leadership for a travel-technology startup and a media company, building with Claude Code daily.
Ran engineering across a portfolio of client products. Introduced agentic development, built custom AI models and training pipelines, and deployed AI solutions at scale.
Platform strategy and delivery for a language-learning product and a WooCommerce-based retailer.
Pivoted the company from consumer to B2B and built the platform that won the SIIA CODiE 2018 and Reimagine Education Gold 2018, and reached the Harvard New Venture Competition final.
Three VP roles over six years: Online Technology, Software Engineering, Technology Innovation. Brought Agile to the organisation, cut $5.2 million a year in cost, and won approval for a next-generation learning platform.
Built the classifieds platform from the first line of code to the acquisition by Hearst in 2007. Founded Open West Labs in the same years.
Consulting CTO in Italy, SMS and SS7 telecom systems in C, and PHP from 1999 across every framework that mattered.
Open source
Brimley Labs is named after Brimley, a Morkie and the goodest boy. Everything here is MIT licensed.
Bringing Retrieval to Indexed Models. Semantic search for Laravel using Ollama and pgvector. Local-first, privacy-focused, no API keys required, OpenAI supported if you want it. Works with any Eloquent model through a trait.
A live operator console for SQL databases. Watch sessions, locks, replication and slow queries across PostgreSQL, MySQL and SQLite from the terminal. Built autonomously by an agent platform of my own design, reviewed by me.
Forks of click, flask, chi and zod used as controlled case studies for autonomous agent work: the same card, the same guardrails, four languages, with the diffs public.
Skills
Working Strong Expert
About
I have been writing code for more than a quarter of a century and I still get excited about a hard problem. It started with BASIC in fifth grade, then Unix at a friend's house whose mother worked at Bell Labs, then MUDs, then PHP professionally in 1999. There was a detour into C, writing telecom protocol drivers, and a couple of years in Italy, before I came back to building products and the teams that build them.
I have led technology organisations of two to three hundred people and I have been the only engineer in the room. Both taught me the same thing. Small teams of strong people outbuild large ones. The person doing the work should be the person you talk to. Price and scope belong in writing before anyone starts.
The last few years have been AI. Not the demos, the deployments: custom models, retrieval over messy real data, agents with guardrails and evaluation, and the cost control that keeps them running. Today I build with Claude Code every day, and I started The Developers Guild so that other senior engineers who work this way can serve the small businesses that were priced out of senior engineering altogether.
I live in Onalaska, Wisconsin, with my family and Brimley, the Morkie this site is named after.
Transportation, logistics and supply chain, education, finance, legal, marketing technology, scientific applications, security, media, ecommerce.
English, native. Italian, professional.
Contact
Client work goes through the Guild, where every piece is quoted as a fixed price and demoed daily. Everything else, find me on LinkedIn or GitHub.