mf/
Portrait of Matthew Field

/ profile

Platform engineer turned independent.

I run a tech consultancy & software firm, publish Field Notes, and write for adults with late-diagnosed ADHD.

Edmonton, AB, Canada

Get in touch

About

I'm a platform & infrastructure engineer with a decade in production Kubernetes, most recently on one of the largest software platform infrastructures in the world. In January 2026 I was laid off, and I gave myself six months to make self-employment pay my family's bills. This site is where that's happening, in public.

I have ADHD, diagnosed around 30, and so does my older son. A lot of my writing is for the adult who found out late (often through their kid) that the coping strategies which carried them through school and a career stopped working the day parenthood or a bigger job arrived. I'm one of those adults, and I write to them as a peer.

The rest of me: I trade options most weekdays, make music with keyboards, guitar & a rack of software instruments, sit on the board of my son's kindergarten society (opens in a new tab), run the tech team at our church (opens in a new tab), do Pilates, and read a lot (opens in a new tab). I've stopped trying to pick one of these to lead with. It's all me.

What I do

Mossfoot Digital is my consultancy & software firm. On the consulting side: fractional IT leadership, technology & security assessments, migration delivery, and tailored contract work for nonprofits and small businesses in Edmonton and remotely across Canada. On the software side it's the home for the products I build, starting with Tradr (opens in a new tab), an open-source trading journal with a free-forever hosted tier and a public repo (opens in a new tab).

Field Notes is my newsletter: the story of getting from laid off to sustainably self-employed, told while it happens, plus the tools I use, the systems I build, and the people I meet. Essays live on this site, and the ones tagged field-notes go out by email. Subscribe here.

Late-diagnosed ADHD. I'm building a peer coaching practice for adults who got their diagnosis after 30. It isn't open yet. Field Notes is where I'll say when it is, and where the writing for that reader goes in the meantime. The work behind it is my own healing, drawn from more than one tradition: classic Jungian psychodynamics and psychoanalysis, somatic experiential practice and soul work, guided visualizations and journaling. The aims are to heal past wounds, disrupt generational trauma, and reparent myself.

Day to day I'm also an options daytrader, which keeps the lights on while the rest grows, and is the reason Tradr exists at all.

I'd still take a serious look at the right senior platform or SRE role. That's a footnote on purpose.

/ experience

Experience

Roles are listed most recent first.

  1. to Present

    Edmonton, AB

    Founder & Principal Consultant

    Mossfoot Digital Inc. (opens in a new tab)

    My Alberta-incorporated consultancy & software firm: fractional IT leadership and infrastructure consulting for small and mid-sized organizations in Edmonton and across Canada, and the home for the software products I build and host.

    • Tradr — Founder & sole engineer

      An open-source (Apache 2.0) stock and options trading journal: fee-exact P&L, a reconcilable ledger, one-command self-hosting, and a hosted offering at tradr.cloud with a free tier, opened to the public in August 2026.

    • Delivered a Google Workspace primary domain migration end to end — planning, user communications, change management, and cutover — on time, on budget, and documented.
    • Offer technology and security assessments, migration delivery, and fractional IT advisory, so a small organization gets senior infrastructure help without carrying a full-time hire.
    • Built and launched Tradr under the firm: a TypeScript monorepo shipped as container images, self-hosted in one command, with a hosted tier that opened to the public on August 27, 2026.

  2. to

    Remote

    Infrastructure Engineer III

    CrowdStrike (opens in a new tab)

    Member of the Infrastructure Engineering Kubernetes team inside the Product Platform organization. Our 40+ clusters ran the bulk of the Falcon Platform's microservices and its data science and ML workflows, in public cloud and in our own datacenters.

    • Rudder — Architect & Lead Engineer

      A single pane of glass for the Kubernetes fleet: one control surface for fleet visibility and cluster operations, replacing an aging Ansible AWX system with a Temporal-powered workflow engine.

    • Temporal.io Platform — Architect & Lead Engineer

      CrowdStrike's first internal Temporal deployment, built from scratch with no prior art and no internal managed offering to work from. It became the durable execution backbone for Infrastructure Engineering's cluster operations, and the foundation Rudder's workflow engine was built on.

      • Architected the cluster topology — running on Kubernetes, backed by Amazon RDS PostgreSQL, with a namespace strategy and multi-region HA across environments.
      • Defined the canonical Go and Python worker, workflow, and activity structure, so the teams that followed started from a convention rather than a blank page.
      • Put workflow code through the same build, test, and deploy pipelines as application services, which kept workflows-as-code on equal footing with the rest of the platform.
      • Wrote the runbook library from scratch — upgrades, namespace management, worker scaling, incident response — the operational base a managed offering would have supplied.
    • Owned build, management, and lifecycle of 40+ Kubernetes clusters across AWS, GCP, OCI, and on-prem Canonical MaaS, spread across North America and Europe.
    • Led GPU-on-Kubernetes as the team's subject-matter expert. Reworked NVIDIA's GPU Operator for egress-restricted networks and internal repositories, turning multi-day upgrade debugging into a YAML change.
    • Built custom FluxCDTeam CRDs mapping team shapes — namespaces, RBAC, org-level definitions — onto our managed FluxCD service, live-synced from the internal Teams API so environments came from a definition, not by hand.
    • Kept the whole 40+ cluster fleet on a regular update cadence for Kubernetes, Ubuntu, kernel, containerd, and Cilium, so no cluster drifted onto an unsupported version.
    • Partnered with 12+ service teams to right-size and migrate dozens of microservices onto the platform.
    • Ran the Prometheus, Thanos, and Grafana stack across multi-cloud and on-prem clusters, carried the pager on the on-call rotation, and led several incident retrospectives and postmortems.
    • Built the Terraform modules and managed the state behind provisioning across cloud tenancies, with Chef handling configuration and drift.
    • kubernetes
    • golang
    • python
    • terraform
    • temporal
    • fluxcd
    • cilium
    • prometheus
    • chef
    • aws
    • gcp
    • oci

  3. to

    Edmonton, AB

    Technical Analyst II

    Computronix (opens in a new tab)

    Computronix sells POSSE, a SaaS platform for permitting, licensing, and enforcement workflows used by governments across North America. We ran three datacenters alongside Azure tenancies and were moving internal systems and hosted products onto Azure.

    • LaunchPad — Developer

      A self-service portal on AKS where developer and infrastructure teams provisioned, monitored, and managed application environments, training and disaster-recovery services, and other managed IT resources.

    • Monitoring & Log Collection — Initiator & Technical Lead

      Standardized metric and log format across the POSSE application stack, then built the Prometheus, Grafana, and Elastic clusters behind it and drove adoption team by team.

    • Turned business requirements into shipped features, writing the spec, sizing the work, and building it.
    • Worked both halves of a hybrid estate — AKS, Azure PaaS data, networking and automation services on one side; Hyper-V failover clusters, iSCSI SAN storage, and firewall HA pairs on the other.
    • Wired Azure DevOps build and release pipelines through to Kubernetes, with sandbox, dev, test, and prod each driven by its own git branch.
    • azure
    • kubernetes
    • python
    • flask
    • postgresql
    • redis
    • terraform
    • packer
    • prometheus
    • grafana
    • elastic-stack
    • azure-devops

  4. to

    Edmonton, AB

    Infrastructure Support

    College and Association of Registered Nurses of Alberta

    IT infrastructure support and project delivery for the provincial nursing regulator, covering the server, network, and end-user estate.

    • Deployed a network-based imaging system that cut device onboarding from a full day to a few hours.
    • Wrote the organization's first IT service catalogue, giving staff one place to see what IT offered and how to ask for it.
    • Rolled out Duo two-factor authentication for SSL VPN remote access.

/ skills

Skills

Cloud & Hybrid Infrastructure
  • AWS
  • GCP
  • OCI
  • Azure
  • Canonical MaaS
  • Hyper-V
Containers, Networking & Identity
  • Kubernetes
  • AKS
  • Cilium
  • containerd
  • Azure AD SSO
Infrastructure as Code & Automation
  • Terraform
  • FluxCD
  • Helm
  • Chef
  • Ansible
  • Packer
Workflow Orchestration & CI/CD
  • Temporal.io
  • workflows-as-code
  • Jenkins
  • Azure DevOps
Languages & Scripting
  • Go
  • Python
  • Bash
  • PowerShell
  • TypeScript
  • SQL
Observability & Reliability
  • Prometheus
  • Thanos
  • Grafana
  • Elastic Stack
  • on-call
  • incident retrospectives
Architecture & Emerging Tech
  • reference architectures
  • reusable patterns
  • technical roadmaps
  • LLM agentic workflows
  • MCP runtime servers

/ education

Education

Credentials are listed most recent first.

  1. Bachelor of Applied Information Systems Technology

    NAIT (opens in a new tab)

    With Honours

    Network Management Major

  2. Network Engineering Technology Diploma

    NAIT (opens in a new tab)

    With Honours

Shoot me a message — I respond to every human :)

ac.dleifwehttam@olleh