~$ cat about.txt

Matt Pryor

Principal Engineer @ Cigna

LinkedIn GitHub Email Boulder, CO

~$ ls ~/projects/

root-cause.app live RootCause Multiplayer incident simulation for engineering teams ReactTypeScriptSocket.IOGemini AI Try it → github.com/mpryor/nothing-less oss TUI pager for tabular data with auto-delimiter detection PythonTextualTUI View on GitHub →

00 About

pod-1 :8443 pod-2 :443 SYN PSH FIN ACK RST ACK dashboard

Platform engineer who builds the infrastructure and tooling that let thousands of engineers ship faster. I've spent the last decade deep in container platforms, networking, and large-scale distributed systems — leading technical strategy across 50+ Kubernetes clusters and 100,000+ containers, while staying hands-on with the hard problems that matter most.

  • Migration tooling that automated the move of 3,000+ microservices to Kubernetes
  • Real-time observability agents for incident response and network troubleshooting
  • Developer portal serving thousands of engineers across the container platform
  • Compliance and best-practices engine for large-scale Kubernetes environments with executive-level rollups and trend reporting
  • Reverse-engineered a Kubernetes CNI plugin to uncover an architectural bottleneck, remediated through kernel-level tuning (RPS) across the fleet

01 Skills

infrastructure-at-scale

Designing and operating large-scale container platforms, hybrid cloud infrastructure, and the automation that keeps them running. Comfortable across the full stack from IaC to kernel tuning.

Kubernetes Cloud Foundry Docker Terraform Ansible AWS GCP vSphere
developer-tooling

Building internal tools that make other engineers faster — migration automation, compliance engines, developer portals, and CLI utilities. If it removes toil or unblocks teams, I'll build it.

Go Python TypeScript React PostgreSQL Redis
observability

Production ownership, incident response, and deep-dive root cause analysis across distributed systems. Equally comfortable in Grafana dashboards and packet captures.

Prometheus Grafana Splunk Dynatrace / New Relic Network Analysis Linux Performance
technical-direction

Setting technical direction, making architectural trade-offs, and aligning teams around platform strategy. The glue between deep technical work and org-wide outcomes.

Currently exploring Rust and eBPF.

02 Projects

root-cause.app live
RootCause Try it →

A multiplayer incident simulation where engineering teams practice diagnosing production outages together in real-time. Four specialized teams — Platform, Application, Database, and Networking — each get their own diagnostic tools and must collaborate across team boundaries to find the root cause. A cross-team gate system forces realistic collaboration patterns: some clues are locked until another team runs the right diagnostic first.

Scenario authors write campaigns with pre-authored skill outputs for deterministic, fast gameplay. AI scoring (with a keyword-matching fallback) evaluates team answers at the end of each session.

React TypeScript Socket.IO Express PostgreSQL Gemini AI
github.com/mpryor/nothing-less oss
— GitHub →

A TUI pager for interactively exploring tabular data from pipes and files. Auto-detects delimiters (CSV, TSV, JSON, multi-space), supports regex parsing with named capture groups to transform unstructured logs into structured columns, and handles real-time streaming — pipe in kubectl get pods -w or tail -f and explore as data arrives.

Vi-like keybindings for filtering, sorting, and pivoting. A copy-on-write buffer system tracks every transformation as a new tab, so you can backtrack through your analysis at any point.

Python Textual

03 Experience & Awards

Cigna

4+ years

Principal Engineer

April 2021 – Present

  • Principal Engineer driving technical direction for Cigna's internal container platform — 100,000+ containers across 50+ Kubernetes clusters serving 3,000+ microservices
  • Architected migration tooling that automated connectivity, dependency mapping, and capacity planning for 3,000+ microservices — saving over 400,000 engineering hours across the organization
  • Built waste detection and capacity planning tools across 50+ clusters, reclaiming significant compute resources and reducing infrastructure spend
  • Developed a compliance and best-practices engine for the Kubernetes platform with executive-level rollups and trend reporting
  • Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes subject matter expert, providing technical guidance and triage across the organization
🏆 Dragon Award 2025

Team award for the most impactful project across the organization that year.

🏆 PCF Retirement Top Contributor 2024

Awarded to top contributors of a large migration program (1000s of engineers), for building automation tooling that securely migrated connectivity requirements from a legacy system to locked-down Kubernetes egress rules.

🏆 Innovator of the Year 2023

Awarded for migration automation and a networking agent that harvested connectivity requirements from the legacy system, feeding a real-time dashboard for incident response and troubleshooting.

Express Scripts

4.5 years

Senior Software Development Engineer

April 2018 – April 2021

  • Responsible for the reliability, self-service tooling, and automation for ExpressScripts' private container platform (30,000+ containers / 3000 microservices)
  • Automated the redesign of our private cloud's network stack with a GitOps approach to manage virtual network infrastructure
  • Built observability and troubleshooting tooling including a network agent that collects, graphs, and monitors real-time network statistics for every container (30,000+)
  • Implemented a noisy neighbor alerting mechanism that detects anomalous activity and alerts the appropriate application owners
🏆 Process Hack of the Year 2019

Awarded for a cross-team self-service automation of Splunk onboarding — a one-click button that harvested log examples, data requirements, and growth trends to feed into the Splunk team's onboarding system.

Cloud Engineer

November 2016 – April 2018

  • Architected and implemented Express Scripts' internal cloud portal — a single pane of glass allowing developers to visualize and interact with 3000+ microservices hosted on the platform

CenturyLink

1.75 years

Senior Software Developer

April 2016 – November 2016

  • Developed a collaboration portal for internal team communication and KPI reporting using Node.js, Express, MongoDB, AngularJS, and Bootstrap on Cloud Foundry
  • Developed Slack applications for team manager administration via slash commands

Software Developer

March 2015 – April 2016

  • Developed an identity management system to discover and track accounts in third party SaaS products using Java / SpringBoot and NoSQL
  • Built an internal admin portal for onboarding, offboarding, and user lookup
  • Replaced a legacy BPM tool by building a new one on top of Activiti and Java

Advanced Resources

8 months

QA Automation Engineer

August 2014 – March 2015

  • Built end-to-end testing suites, smoke tests, integration tests, and unit tests for a home-grown BPM tool
  • Contributed enhancements to a core testing framework owned by CenturyLink's testing team

04 Education

Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville

Bachelor of Arts, Computer Science · 2009 – 2013