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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Zentinelle

Zentinelle

Zentinelle is the Agent GRC layer of the Calliope stack. It sits in the request path between AI agents and LLM providers, enforces policy, and produces the audit chain compliance teams need. Twenty-four policy evaluators, twenty-four backend integrations, five compliance frameworks shipping today (SOC 2, GDPR, HIPAA, EU AI Act, NIST AI RMF). MIT-licensed. The Control and Secure stages of BROCS, in one product.

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Astrolift

Astrolift

Astrolift is the multi-cloud and on-prem Kubernetes runtime of the Calliope stack. Same manifest against AWS, GCP, Azure, vanilla Kubernetes, or bare metal. Apps and agents move with you, not with the vendor. MIT-licensed. The Run stage of BROCS.

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DUAD

DUAD

DUAD is the advisory practice I run with a friend. We work with leadership teams on AI, cloud, digital transformation, and healthcare technology. Senior depth from people who have actually been in the seats. Engagements are scoped narrowly and finished cleanly. No fluff.

Work with us →
Fossilrepo

Fossilrepo

Fossilrepo is a CONFLICT project. A self-hosted Fossil SCM forge packaged as a one-command, full-stack deployable unit. It bundles Fossil with Caddy, Litestream backups, and a Django management layer so a developer forge can live entirely inside an organization's own perimeter. Think GitLab Omnibus, but for Fossil.

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PlanOpticon

PlanOpticon

PlanOpticon is a CONFLICT tool that turns recorded conversation and documents into structured knowledge. Transcripts, diagrams, action items, knowledge graphs. It connects to twenty-plus source platforms and routes across AI providers automatically. The input layer we use for downstream tooling, including Calliope and Navegador.

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Navegador

Navegador

Navegador is the project knowledge graph for AI coding agents. It builds and maintains a queryable graph of a software project, combining static code analysis with human-curated business knowledge, so agents have precise structured context instead of raw file dumps. A CONFLICT project.

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Scuttlebot

Scuttlebot

Scuttlebot is an agent coordination backplane built on IRC. Agents subscribe to channels, see each other, coordinate work, and pass messages over a protocol that has been running reliably for decades. Boring infrastructure for un-boring workloads. A CONFLICT project.

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Boilerworks

Boilerworks

I built Boilerworks at CONFLICT to provide production-ready templates and frameworks for shipping faster. It is 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

BROCS: The OS for Enterprise AI
L
posted by admin
May 23, 2026

BROCS: The OS for Enterprise AI

I was sitting with a friend who runs engineering at a healthtech startup, big name, redacted. PHI on the line, audit obligations, the kind of company …

Read More →
It Shipped: Cynefin Diagrams in Mermaid
L
posted by admin
May 6, 2026

It Shipped: Cynefin Diagrams in Mermaid

PR #7535 merged today. Mermaid now has a Cynefin framework diagram type, the first text-based DSL for Cynefin diagrams anywhere. This post wraps up …

Read More →
Cynefin: A Framework for Thinking About Thinking
L
posted by admin
April 5, 2026

Cynefin: A Framework for Thinking About Thinking

At the end of the last post, I said I was building Cynefin diagram support for Mermaid next. Before I get into the implementation, I want to talk …

Read More →
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