About
About Matthew Perez
Matthew Perez is a Forward Deployed Engineer: twenty years of client-facing video production, most recently at T-Mobile, paired with a portfolio of self-built, production AWS applications shipped solo, end to end. Those two careers turned out to be one job: sit between a hard technical problem and a real user, then ship something that works.
Two crafts, one job
The first career is twenty years of client-facing video production: freelance director of photography and editor across Los Angeles and Seattle starting in 2006, founder of Solid State Media (2008 – 2013), Lead Video Producer and Creative Program Manager at The Garrigan Lyman Group (2013 – 2018), and Sr. Video Producer / Instructional Designer at T-Mobile since 2025, where he built the business division's video studio from the ground up and has been the one-man-band video producer for a 3,500+ person national sales organization.
Starting in 2024, he began integrating AI tools into that same video pipeline: writing, storyboarding, concepting, and editing workflows. By 2025, he was designing and shipping the team's production LLM systems, delivered entirely within enterprise IT constraints. He now trains and mentors the next generation of producers, having already trained two video producers and an intern, and currently mentoring three junior producers.
Outside T-Mobile, he has designed, built, and operated a portfolio of production AWS applications solo since 2025, end to end: architecture, infrastructure as code, CI/CD, and the product itself. They are documented as case studies on this site, each proving a different Forward Deployed Engineer competency, from real-time voice AI and Neon-native architecture with row-level-security authorization to agentic AI running in production across eight products.
Why the dual identity is the qualification
Twenty years of client-facing production means daily practice translating a technical or creative problem into something an executive, a client, or a field rep can act on, in plain language, on a deadline. Building ten AWS applications alone means the same translation problem worked from the engineering side, with no team to hand the hard part to.
"I already sit between a hard problem and a real user."
That is the Forward Deployed Engineer case, and it is the case this site is built to prove from three angles at once: the work, the resume, and this page.