Raleigh, NC · Engineering Leadership × Applied AI

Engineering leader & hands-on builder.

25 years across full-stack development, cloud architecture, and applied AI. I direct a ~50-person organization shipping production agentic-AI systems — and still ship production code daily, with an evidence-based view of where AI-assisted engineering helps and where it doesn't.

View Résumé LinkedIn Email Me
Matt Perry
Navy veteran · Ships code daily
25+Years building
~50Person org led
10M+Daily transactions
#1Global SAS instructor ×2
Now: Director of Technical Automation & Technical Integrations at Holland America Line (Carnival Corporation) — building and operating a multi-tenant agent platform (Java/Spring Boot, React/TypeScript, PostgreSQL/pgvector, Terraform on AWS) where agents, knowledge bases, and MCP tool integrations are versioned configuration rather than code. In production across Holland America, Princess, and Seabourn.
01

Experience

Oct 2024 → Present

Director — Technical Automation & Technical Integrations

Holland America Line (Carnival Corporation) · Remote
  • Direct ~50 professionals — managers, PMs, tech leads, onshore/offshore engineers — with multimillion-dollar capital budgets.
  • Built and operate an internal agent platform in production across three cruise brands; own its entire Terraform-provisioned AWS footprint, availability, and spend.
  • OpenAPI-to-agent-tool pipeline: published API specs become governed, callable tools for LLM consumers. MCP endpoints published and consumed in production with per-tenant auth.
  • Designed the governance layer enterprise AI requires: tenant isolation, RBAC, config snapshots pinned to every run, guardrails, and LLM-judge evals with regression gates.
  • Lead the org's adoption of AI-assisted development — and ship the same way: AI-authored changes with tests, tracked tickets, and reviewed deploys.
  • Pioneered the enterprise AI strategy adopted across Carnival brands, championed by the CEO and Board; established corporate-wide API standards and a Java microservice layer handling 10M+ daily transactions.
Apr → Oct 2024

Senior Manager — Guest Commerce

Holland America Line · Remote
  • Delivered revenue-critical guest-facing systems — Shore Excursions and "Come Back and Sail" — generating hundreds of millions in annual revenue.
  • Built the AI-powered crew-onboarding proof of concept that led directly to promotion and creation of the Technical Automation team.
2016 → 2024

Principal / Advisory Pre-Sales Technical Architect

SAS Institute · Cary, NC (23 years at SAS, 2001–2024)
  • Drove $10M+ annual pipeline across 50+ Fortune 500 engagements — BNSF, McDonald's, FedEx, Carnival, Travelport, UPS.
  • Replaced an incumbent Palantir solution at BNSF; delivered McDonald's price-optimization UI ($823K) and Travelport real-time bot detection ($3.6M) scoring 3,400+ TPS.
  • Created the Viya Data Editor, evaluated by SAS R&D and Dr. Goodnight for enterprise deployment; shore-excursion recommender deployed to 26 ships.
2011 → 2016

Principal Training Consultant

SAS Institute
  • Ranked #1 SAS instructor globally in 2014 and 2015 on customer evaluations and training-effectiveness metrics.
  • Authored the Demand-Driven Forecasting curriculum; taught across the US, Helsinki, and Barcelona.
2001 → 2011

Senior Software Developer & Consultant

SAS Institute
  • Led front-end development for flagship products including SAS Drug Development and Contact Center Planning & Optimization.
1993 → 1999

Sonar Watch Supervisor & Sonar Technician

United States Navy · Jacksonville, FL
  • First sailor aboard to qualify as Sonar Supervisor during a first enlistment; led 10 technicians in mission-critical operations. Deployed for Operation Sharp Guard (NATO). ESWS qualified; Navy & Marine Corps Achievement Medal.
02

Skills

AI Engineering

Anthropic ClaudeMCP — publish & consumeAWS BedrockAgentic orchestrationRAG & retrieval evalsLLM-judge evalsGuardrailsCost attribution

AI-Assisted Development

Claude Code in real deliveryTeam adoption patternsReview/data/IP guardrailsMeasuring impact

Cloud & Platform

AWSTerraformECS FargateRDS PostgreSQLCloudFrontDockerCI/CDMulti-AZ HAOpenTelemetry

APIs & Identity

OpenAPI / SwaggerRESTOAuth 2.0 / OIDCOktaMicrosoft Entra IDRBAC

Languages & Data

Java / Spring BootTypeScript / ReactPythonSQLPostgreSQL / pgvectorSAS

Leadership

Hiring & developmentRoadmap ownershipAgile deliveryVendor & offshore mgmtBudget oversightExecutive communication
03

Recognition & Education

'24–'25

AI strategy championed by Carnival’s executive leadership; recognized with the founding of the Technical Automation team and promotion to Director

2023

Replaced a deeply entrenched Palantir solution at BNSF with the modern CIQ (Continuous Improvement in Quality) analytics application

2021

Top SAS Customer Advisory Performer of the Year — the “Technical Decathlete” award

2019

Patent contributor — outlier detection system

2018

$3.6M Travelport win — real-time bot detection at 3,400+ TPS

'14·'15

Top Global SAS Instructor, two consecutive years

'93–'99

Navy & Marine Corps Achievement Medal and Letter of Commendation — U.S. Navy

SAS US-MTES Technical Decathlete crystal award, presented to Matt Perry, 2021
The hardware: SAS “Technical Decathlete,” 2021
MBA, Information Technology ManagementNorth Carolina State University
BBA, Computer Information Systems (Honors)James Madison University
CertificationsAWS Certified Cloud Practitioner · Advanced & Base SAS Programming

Always building something.

Nights and weekends I run Collection Innovations — a production SaaS for collectors (AI valuations, image recognition, 100k-item catalog) built solo on the same stack I lead at work: Spring Boot, React, Postgres, Terraform on AWS, and heavy AI-assisted development.

Visit site →