About

I am a lead web product engineer based in Los Angeles. A developer involved from the early product stages of purpose and requirements gathering all the way through final production. Requirement and planning documents, design, implementation of UX, coding frontend and backend, pipelines and deployment. I'm something of a one man band.

Accessibility

Making your applications work well for everyone is a goal almost everyone has in the abstract. However, It can become more difficult once you start getting specific. Even more so with users on the edges; those with special needs and conditions you need to address in your design phase.

The good news is this has never been easier. The bad news is because this has never been easier, there is more pressure to have it done very well. And, sadly, it's not been "baked in" to as many production processes yet and is still overlooked or even forgotten completely by some teams.

Lucky for me, I know how to fill these gaps. I've delivered WCAG 2.1/2.2 AA compliant applications for enterprise clients, sat through third-party audits from the first scan to the last remediation ticket, and written the training materials that taught other developers how to stop creating the same issues I've also learned that the cheapest fix is process, not code. Getting accessibility into design sign-off, and getting a scanner into CI, prevents more problems than any amount of cleanup afterward

How I work

I like being involved early if possible; close to product decisions. Some of my best work has come from being involved early enough to still modify or react to a requirement, rather than receiving it fully specified and building around issues or having to kick them back.

I've led teams large and small, while also writing and overseeing code the whole time. I try to keep my eye on the things that move and maintain the most effectively. Things like: efficient onboarding docs that actually onboard, standards a team agrees to because they were part of writing them, code review that catches issues in advance.

These days, like many other devs, I'm using AI Coding tools almost every day. At the moment this is Claude Code but Cursor, Copilot, v0 and many others have been cycled in and out. This seems to be changing month to month. Regardless of the tool, they've changed how fast I can move through the boring parts. What hasn't changed is the part where you still have to know what good and bad look like.

Who I've worked with

Over my career I've been fortunate to work with a lot of large multi-million and even multi-billion dollar companies. A few of the biggest projects have been with: Employbridge, Google, Cardinal Health, Wellmark and Ford and more recently a couple of early-stage AI startups.

Short summaries are on the work page.

Get in touch

I’m currently looking for product engineering roles. Though I also do direct contracts and consulting. You can learn more on my consulting page.

Email is best: main@mattirwin.codes. I’m also on LinkedIn.