mnelson.ca

Matthew Nelson

AI-native Data Platform Engineer · Berkeley MIDS · P.Eng

Calgary, Alberta · matthewpeternelson@gmail.com · +1-403-667-3022 · https://mnelson.ca · Github: https://github.com/matthewpnelson · LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/matthewpeternelson

Data platform engineer and AI-native builder. 10 years in data, 16 in engineering, Berkeley MIDS and P.Eng. I build production data platforms on Dagster, Snowflake, Polars, DuckDB and dbt. I then ship AI-native systems on top of them. These are LLM-in-the-loop pipelines, traced tool-loop agents with evals, and agentic developer tooling with Claude Code and MCP. I rebuilt StackDX's US data platform as lead engineer. I now run the roadmap and code review for the 6-person team, and still ship weekly.

Selected Impact

  • Architected StackDX's production Dagster platform across 15 US states and 945 transformation assets. It distills a 3.8 TB source layer into a 10.3 GB layer serving 300M+ records.
  • Founded twochannel.ai, an AI-native catalog of 18k+ products across 2k+ brands. LLM-in-the-loop pipelines and a Claude Code toolchain maintain it, with one engineer end to end.
  • Owned Canlin's regulated annual reserves evaluation for 5 years. This externally-audited valuation feeds the financial statements, and technical revisions added +$730M (NPV10).
  • Built the dbt Cloud / Snowflake platform that became Canlin's foundation for operational data, BI and ML. Automation from it saved 50+ hours/week across Operations.
  • Set the roadmap and review code for a 6-person, two-country data team at StackDX. Still ship weekly in the platform codebases.

Experience

Product Manager, Stack Maps & Public Data · Stack Technologies Ltd.

May 2026 — Present

www.stackdx.com/

Moved from lead engineer into product ownership after the US data platform rebuild. I run the roadmap and code review for a 6-person team across two countries. I still ship weekly in the Dagster and Stack Maps codebases.

Product ownership and team leadership

  • Run the roadmap, priorities and code review for a 6-person team across the US and Canadian data codebases. Still ship in the Dagster platform each week.
  • Built the PM tooling as software, in daily use. It includes a Jira roadmap scheduler, human-gated triage of production failures, and skills for weekly updates.
  • Set Stack Maps product direction. Prototyped the forecast and type curve feature and the new US well-details pane, now landing with minor changes.

Still shipping on the US platform

  • Designed the US well-detail data model as six panel exposures keyed on api10/api12/api14. Production rolls up from the filed grain and loads to Redshift by state-partitioned COPY.
  • Wrote the decline engine for the forecasting app. It fits deterministic bounded Arps curves per well and phase, with EUR and fit diagnostics, monthly in Dagster.
  • Added Mississippi as the sixteenth state in three days. The data covers wells, production back to 1980, permits from 1997 and well dates.

Data Platform Engineer · Stack Technologies Ltd.

Jun 2025 — May 2026

www.stackdx.com/

Lead engineer on the USA data platform rebuild. I replaced a legacy Python ETL stack with a production-grade Dagster-native architecture on AWS. Polars and DuckDB do the heavy transformation work. The platform distills a 3.8 TB source layer of 1.03M regulator files into a 10.3 GB exposure layer. That layer serves 127M well production records, 172M lease production records and 4.1M wellheaders to customer endpoints. I built it AI-first, on custom Claude Code skills and hooks for scaffolding, formatting and review.

Modern Data Platform Architecture

  • Architected a production Dagster platform across 15 US states and 945 assets. It distills a 3.8 TB source layer into a 10.3 GB layer serving 300M+ records.
  • Stopped a repeat production out-of-memory failure. Converted the Texas production fact build, the largest on the platform, to a streaming Polars plan.
  • Designed 146 contract-driven freshness checks that fan out to 468 evaluations across all 15 states. Calibrated the thresholds to stop false-positive alerts.
  • Designed reusable exposure and coalesce patterns. Legacy mart schemas run on the new fact tables, and a new state extends the pattern without a bespoke build.

AI-native Developer Workflow

  • Built a project Claude Code toolchain: an auto-format hook and skills for pipeline triage, exposure coverage and schema work. My token-optimization layer has saved 655M tokens across projects.

Cloud Infrastructure & DevOps

  • Deployed the AWS footprint with Terraform across staging and production. It is RDS, S3 and ECS compute that Dagster launches and manages per job.
  • Implemented CI/CD on GitHub Actions with ruff, pyright and asset schema-contract tests. Automated the branching and deployment behind staging-to-production releases.

Framework & Team Enablement

  • Implemented 10 of 15 state pipelines solo. Two non-platform engineers then shipped the rest from the documented conventions and schema contracts.

Founder & Principal Engineer · Twochannel

Jan 2021 — Present

twochannel.ai

Designed and built Twochannel end to end: catalog, ingestion pipelines, search, recommendations and frontend. I rebuilt it three times since 2021 as the stack evolved, and launched it publicly in 2026. AI-native workflows maintain almost all of the 18k+ product / 2k+ brand catalog. These are LLM-in-the-loop scrapers, structured-output enrichment, semantic dedup and a Claude Code toolchain over the full monorepo. A catalog this size normally needs a small data team, and it's just me.

AI-assisted product catalog at scale

  • A brand-scraper, LLM normalizer and reviewed dedup pipeline maintains 18k+ products across 2k+ brands in Directus. It needs minimal manual work.
  • Shipped a 14-tool member assistant with every turn traced to Langfuse. A 6-suite, 4-model eval bake-off picked the model and caught it inventing product ids.
  • Replaced a 12-agent Claude Code curation team with a judged pipeline of 7 decision types. Haiku escalates to Sonnet, writes can be undone, and rollout is shadow-first.
  • A wizard captures budget, room and genres. An async build job returns complete system variants within signal-chain adjacency and per-category budget limits.

Platform Architecture

  • Built a Turborepo monorepo across three hosting targets. It ships Next.js on Vercel, Directus on Railway, Algolia search, Neo4j relationships and Doppler-managed secrets.
  • Shipped GDPR Article 17 erasure: a twelve-step deletion pipeline with audit trail, CI-enforced FK rules and weekly orphan sweep. An 86-test Playwright E2E suite backs it.

Senior Data Analytics Engineer · Paramount Resources Limited

Apr 2024 — May 2025

paramountres.com

Senior member of the Data Analytics and Integration team. I brought best practices across the full data stack, mentored ICs and advocated for a modern data platform. I delivered custom web apps, modern data-stack PoCs, data engineering pipelines and high-fidelity dashboards. Toolkit: Databricks, PowerBI, Spotfire, dbt Core, cube.js, DuckDB; SQL, Python, R, DAX.

Dashboards & Corporate Reporting

  • Built the corporate PowerBI dashboard suite for Netback, Operating Cost and Capital. Executives, operations, production engineering and development use its corporate-to-well drill-downs.
  • Automated the weekly well production report end to end with Spotfire and Power Automate. This removed a half-day manual task from the analytics manager each week.

Custom Web Applications

  • Replaced a manual 2–3-hour Excel frac-scheduling process with a Streamlit optimization app. Its sequence plans ran ~8 multi-well pads.

Data Governance & Platform Advocacy

  • Built a local modern data stack PoC in Docker to replace legacy R and CSV processes. The stack was Python, dbt, cube.js, DuckDB and PowerBI.
  • Advocated for cloud-first analytics on the data governance committee. Educated senior leadership on modern stack design.

Data & Advanced Analytics Lead · Canlin Energy Corporation

Feb 2022 — Apr 2024

canlinenergy.com/

Designed, built and ran Canlin's modern data stack: dbt Cloud, Snowflake, DataRobot, Tableau and Streamlit. I led the analytics for the Integrated Remote Operating Centre (IROC). I owned descriptive and predictive solutions end to end and mentored junior professionals into data roles. I made the business case to senior leadership for sustained investment in analytics.

Corporate Data Warehouse on dbt Cloud + Snowflake

  • Built the dbt Cloud / Snowflake platform that became Canlin's foundation for operational data, BI and ML. It gave one source of truth from SCADA to Accounting.
  • Saved 50+ hours/week across Operations. Automated the weekly production reporting process end to end: backend workflows, input sheets and the report itself.

Data Science & ML Ops

  • Deployed a modified XGBoost forecaster that infers daily across 8,000+ wells on a 30-day horizon. It also feeds 2-year forecasts of the full well set to corporate reporting.
  • Built the real-time well-status analytics behind Canlin's remote operations centre (~500 wells). It includes networkx-based outage impact assessment and anomaly-detection reporting.
  • Built a Streamlit SME-labeling app and a classification model. The model ranks well risk across the portfolio, with explanations.
  • Built a home-grown ML-ops layer on Streamlit, Snowflake and NocoDB for labeling and data input. DataRobot ran the productionized models.

Corporate Data Scientist & Reserves Manager · Canlin Energy Corporation

Oct 2017 — Jan 2022

canlinenergy.com/

Drove Canlin's transition to a self-service data model by pairing data engineering with petroleum-data expertise. I implemented Tableau as the company-wide reporting tool and data mart. I advocated for repeatable BI, advanced analytics and automation. I owned the regulated annual reserves evaluation, the externally-audited valuation of every corporate asset. It ties directly to the financial statements. Technical revisions improved its accuracy and added +$730M in value.

Tableau data-warehouse implementation

  • Implemented Tableau as the corporate reporting platform. Published 100+ data sources, 50 workbooks and 20 Prep flows in year one.
  • Mentored every Tableau Creator and Explorer in the company. Made the executive case for self-service data.

Corporate Reserves — regulated annual asset valuation, 5 years

  • Owned the externally-audited NI 51-101 reserves evaluation for 5 years. Technical revisions added +$730M (NPV10) across four consecutive cycles.

Corporate Acquisitions & Divestitures

  • Built the data flows and dashboards for rapid A&D evaluation. The divestiture cycle, at depressed prices, took corporate debt from $120M to $0.

Exploitation / Development Engineer, Foothills & South · Centrica Energy Canada

Jul 2014 — Sep 2017

www.centrica.com/

Exploitation and development engineering across multiple assets. I authored the multi-scenario asset-longevity analysis that set the 5–10-year corporate strategic direction.

Asset-longevity analysis & internal tooling

  • Modeled asset longevity across all operated facilities in multiple scenarios. The analysis set the 5–10-year corporate strategic direction.
  • Built a VBA opportunity-tracking tool with a staging and approval workflow for development planning.

Production & Exploitation Engineer · Pengrowth Energy

Aug 2010 — Jun 2014

On-site production engineering plus exploitation engineering across multiple assets. I built multi-dimensional tracking models from time-series sensor data and designed data-driven drill programs.

Highlights across both roles

  • On-site production and operations engineering, with long-term sensor-data trending and equipment monitoring.
  • Built multi-dimensional tracking models from time-series thermocouple sensor data.
  • Designed drill programs and ran feasibility analysis across multiple assets.

Engineering Co-op Student · Pengrowth Energy (Co-op)

2006 — 2010

Multiple co-op terms in the University of Waterloo Engineering program. These were 8 months at Lanmark Engineering, 4 months at the Olds Sour Gas Plant and 12 months at Pengrowth. The Pengrowth term was an Exploitation Engineering co-op in the office.

Selected Projects

twochannel.ai · twochannel.ai

2021 — Current

AI-assisted HiFi product catalog and intelligent stereo-system designer. Founder project; see the Twochannel entry under Experience for the full detail. LLM-augmented ingestion, semantic dedup and a Claude-Code-first developer workflow maintain 18k+ products across 2k+ brands. Stack: Next.js, Directus, Algolia, Neo4j, Turborepo.

  • AI-native monorepo developed primarily through Claude Code (skills, sub-agents, hooks, MCP)
  • LLM-in-the-loop ingestion + human-reviewed semantic dedup
  • Next.js frontend on Vercel, Directus CMS on Railway, Algolia search, Neo4j relationships
  • Doppler single-source-of-truth secret management across Vercel / Railway / GitHub Actions
  • 86-test Playwright E2E suite

StackDX USA Data Platform · www.stackdx.com

2025 — Current

Production-grade USA oil & gas data platform at StackDX. It has Dagster-native orchestration and transformations, a Polars/DuckDB performance layer and Terraform-managed AWS infra. I developed it AI-first with a purpose-built Claude Code toolchain. The toolchain is task skills for pipeline triage, exposure coverage and schema work, plus an auto-format hook.

  • 15 US states, 945 Dagster transformation assets, 300M+ served records
  • Targeted Polars + DuckDB rewrites and incremental materializations cutting processing time on critical datasets
  • Reusable exposure/coalesce-sources patterns for legacy-schema compatibility
  • AWS infra-as-code (RDS, ECS, S3) with Terraform
  • Custom Claude Code skills and hooks driving developer velocity

Instill · instillmeditation.ca

2017 — 2018

A modern and refined meditation and lifestyle brand. The site remains active. The bulk of the build ran 2017–2018 as a full-stack React app for online course content.

Vedic Meditation Directory · learnvedicmeditation.co

2018 — 2019

Helped students find their local teacher of Vedic Meditation. It ran through multiple versions, from a full-stack React app down to a simple Next.js static site. A single Google Doc powers the final version, so teachers manage their own listings.

Skills

AI Engineering & Agentic Development: Claude Code (agents, skills, hooks, slash commands, sub-agents), MCP servers & clients, Anthropic / OpenAI / Perplexity APIs, Vercel AI SDK, Structured outputs & schema-adherent LLM calls, Tool-loop agents with scope and grounding guards, Evals & model bake-offs, Langfuse / OpenTelemetry tracing, Prompt caching, RAG, LLM-in-the-loop data pipelines, Editors: Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf

Data Engineering & Modern Data Stack: dbt (Core & Cloud), Dagster, Snowflake, Snowpark, Polars, DuckDB, Tableau Prep, cube.js & dbt semantic layers, pandas, SQL, Schema contracts

Cloud, Infra & DevOps: AWS (ECS, RDS, S3), Terraform, Docker, GitHub Actions CI/CD, Vercel, Railway, Supabase, Doppler, pre-commit / ruff / pyright

Data Visualization & BI: Tableau, PowerBI, Spotfire, Plotly, D3.js, matplotlib, Seaborn, Dash, Bokeh, ggplot2

Machine Learning & NLP: scikit-learn, XGBoost, PyTorch, Hugging Face, nltk, Time-series forecasting, Classification, Anomaly detection

Databases: Snowflake, PostgreSQL, DuckDB, Neo4j, networkX, MongoDB, SQL Server, Oracle

Web App Development: Next.js, React, Astro, Directus (headless CMS), Algolia, Node.js, Express, Tailwind CSS, Playwright, Streamlit, Flask, Dash, Turborepo / npm workspaces

ML Ops: Snowflake & Snowpark, DataRobot, Streamlit labeling apps, Active learning workflows

Programming Languages: Python, SQL, TypeScript, JavaScript, Bash, R

Upstream Oil & Gas: Exploitation / Development Engineering, Production Engineering, Operations, Corporate reporting, A&D evaluation

Petroleum Reserves Evaluation: COGEH, NI 51-101

Education

Master of Information and Data Science · University of California, Berkeley

May 2016 — Jun 2018 · GPA 3.888

Bachelor of Applied Science, Chemical Engineering · University of Waterloo

Sep 2005 — Jun 2010

Certifications

  • Professional Engineering Designation (P.Eng) — Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Alberta (APEGA) (2014)

Awards

  • Randy Duxbury Memorial Award — University of Waterloo (2010)
  • Ontario International Education Opportunity Scholarship — University of Waterloo (2007)