I'M LEO, LEADER, FOUNDER & BUILDER

LEADERSHIP • SCALE • AI & PRODUCT

I work with engineering teams and technical leaders who are navigating complexity, especially where scale, reliability, and AI collide. My focus is on cutting through noise, making hard problems understandable, and building systems that hold up in the real world.

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Engineering leader who builds and ships

From small-scale beginnings to global enterprises, I’ve spent decades turning engineering complexity into clarity. The systems I’ve worked on are trusted by millions and built to perform under real operational pressure. Clarity isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s how things keep working.

25+
Years of experience
Billions
Users served
Startup to Enterprise
Full range

Current Focus

Calliope AI

Calliope AI

As the founder of Calliope AI, I built the platform to solve a problem I kept running into myself. Building production AI was far harder than it needed to be. Calliope is designed to make AI deployment safe, observable, and practical without sacrificing speed. Security, governance, and cost visibility are built in from day one, with the flexibility to run in your cloud or on-prem. The goal is simple. Help teams build with AI confidently, without turning infrastructure into the bottleneck.

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Veracall

Veracall

I founded Veracall as an AI-powered communication and scheduling assistant with smart call management, unified messaging, spam blocking, and voice-activated scheduling. It’s built for individuals and remote teams who want more control over their time.

Join waitlist →
Boilerworks

Boilerworks

I built Boilerworks at CONFLICT to provide production-ready templates and frameworks for shipping faster. It’s for teams who want to skip the boilerplate and get straight to building.

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CONFLICT

CONFLICT

I started CONFLICT as a full-service engineering shop for teams that need to ship. We handle cloud operations, backend systems, mobile apps, AI and ML, and infrastructure for healthcare, ecommerce, and compliance-heavy industries. We deliver where it counts.

Start your project →

Background

I didn’t learn engineering leadership from a playbook. I learned it by founding companies, scaling teams under pressure, and shipping products that had to work. For more than 25 years, my focus has been on building organizations and systems that deliver real results at real scale.

I build orgs. I ship products. I drive results.
Engineering Leadership
Engineering Leadership
I’ve built and led engineering organizations as they grew from small, focused teams into high-trust groups operating at scale. Hiring thoughtfully, developing leaders, and creating cultures that move quickly without cutting corners has been a consistent part of my work.
Product & AI
Product & AI
I’ve shipped products from early concepts through global adoption and continue to build AI-first systems today. I stay close to the code and the product, because effective leadership depends on understanding how things actually get built.
Scale & Reliability
Scale & Reliability
Scale has been a defining theme of my career. I’ve architected systems handling billions of requests, led SREs at Wikimedia, and built platform teams at Grindr during periods of rapid growth. Reliability at scale isn’t theoretical. It’s operational.
Security & Compliance
Security & Compliance
Security and compliance have been core responsibilities, not afterthoughts. I’ve built security programs from scratch, guided teams through first-time PCI compliance, and driven millions in annual cost reductions through disciplined infrastructure and risk management.

Selected Work

Wikimedia Foundation

Wikimedia Foundation

When I was at Wikimedia, my work centered on keeping one of the world’s largest websites running reliably. Wikipedia serves billions of requests every month, and my focus was on platform reliability, transforming incident response, and shaping observability infrastructure strategy in ways that had an impact across the entire organization.

Backcountry.com

Backcountry.com

At Backcountry, I worked at the VP level across TechOps and Information Security, leading a team of more than 30 engineers. The work focused on making the company both safer and more efficient, including building the security organization from scratch, guiding the company through its first PCI compliance, and delivering meaningful, lasting cost reductions.

Grindr

Grindr

Grindr was a period of extreme growth. As the first infrastructure hire, I helped build the engineering team and platform as the product scaled from hundreds of thousands of users to tens of millions. The work involved designing systems capable of handling millions of concurrent users and sustaining heavy, constant traffic without sacrificing reliability.

Leo Mata

Recent Experience

Founder & CEO, Calliope AI

Building AI-first developer tools from zero-to-one. Defining product vision, leading engineering, shipping to market. Multi-model AI workbench for teams that value engineering rigor.

Founder & Managing Director, CONFLICT

Built and lead a distributed engineering organization. Full P&L ownership, client delivery, and technical strategy across AI, cloud, and security for enterprise clients.

Engineering Manager, Wikimedia Foundation

Led SRE teams for Wikipedia—a top 10 global website. Owned observability platform, incident response transformation, and infrastructure strategy serving billions of monthly requests.

Manager TechOps, Backcountry.com

CTO direct report leading 34 engineers across TechOps and InfoSec. Delivered $6M annual cost savings, built security org from zero, and led company to first PCI compliance.

Trusted by

Backcountry
Stance
Cheetah Digital
Zonos
60 Hertz

Latest Blog Posts

What's Next: Regions, Cynefin, and Beyond
L
posted by admin
November 25, 2025

What's Next: Regions, Cynefin, and Beyond

The Wardley Map PR is in draft, working through code review. Here’s what’s on the roadmap once the core implementation lands. Immediate …

Read More →
Deep Dive: Anatomy of a Mermaid Diagram Type
L
posted by admin
November 22, 2025

Deep Dive: Anatomy of a Mermaid Diagram Type

For those curious about the internals, here’s how a Mermaid diagram type comes together. This is the architecture I followed to build Wardley …

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Building the PR
L
posted by admin
November 17, 2025

Building the PR

Time to actually build Wardley Map support for Mermaid. Here’s the journey from “I should do this” to a working PR. Understanding …

Read More →
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