About

One job, told two ways.

I'm Matthew Perez. I've done the forward deployed job for twenty years — client-facing video production, most recently at T-Mobile, paired with a portfolio of self-built, production AWS applications shipped solo, end to end. Two careers that 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

My 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 2018, where I built the business division's video studio from the ground up and have been the one-man-band video producer for a 3,500+ person national sales organization.

Starting in 2024, I began integrating AI tools into that same video pipeline: writing, storyboarding, concepting, and editing workflows. By 2025, I was designing and shipping the team's production LLM systems, delivered entirely within enterprise IT constraints. Along the way I've trained two video producers and an intern, and I currently mentor three junior producers.

Outside T-Mobile, I've 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.

The first craft

Twenty years of it looks like this.

All work →

The case

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 a portfolio of 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.

See the work Read the resume