Matt Drayer Email & Phone Number

Boston, Ma, Us

Massachusetts, United States

As Chief Architect at 2U, my role is to guide the architectural evolution of our technology platforms, ensuring they scale and meet the diverse needs of our learners, partners, and enterprise customers. Leading with a "deliver fast, deliver well" mentality, I work across the full tech stack to solve complex problems and develop innovative solutions that support 2U's growth and transformation. I thrive in the space between ideation and execution — defining roadmaps, aligning stakeholders, and making decisions that balance the company's immediate goals with long-term organizational sustainability. My aim is always to foster a culture of continuous learning and iteration, bringing fresh ideas to life.Over the last decade with edX/2U, I’ve worn many hats, from solutions architect to engineering manager to professional services director. My extensive journey with our products and partnerships provides me with a unique perspective on the challenges and opportunities in online program management and educational technology. Whether it’s designing new systems or wrangling legacy tech, I’ve always focused on offering practical, scalable solutions that drive real-world impact. I’m passionate about transforming ideas into real-world assets that push boundaries, solve thorny problems, and deliver value quickly — because at the end of the day, that’s where the fun is.

Greater Boston Area

Boston has a vibrant, robust startup scene. It amazes me that so many people are so driven to make dreams become realities. Brilliant minds.I'm a huge subscriber to the Lean Startup and Lean UX movements. I speak Agile fluently, and I love to facilitate Design Thinking exercises. My freelance engagements typically cover topics related to getting your initiative off the ground quickly with minimum technical investment and maximum customer feedback. As I often say, it's all about iterative learning, and in order to take advantage of that you need to be in the market -- now. Why are you waiting? What's holding you back?I've collaborated with everyone from experienced entrepreneurs to college students, on everything from patent filings and business plans to blasting out the final lines of code for that minimally viable piece of functionality required to get your toe in the water. I'm intrigued by market disruption, rule-busting, and obviation. If you're talking about eliminating boundaries instead of pushing them, I'm interested.I'd love to speak with you about your venture and how I might help you to learn and move forward.

Greater Boston Area

Marblehead Professionals is a networking group dedicated to professionals working or residing in Marblehead, Massachusetts, a town that has fostered entrepreneurship since the early 1700s. Our objective is to help people in Marblehead expand their resources, contacts and connections. With over 1000 active members and growing, we provide an active, vibrant forum to exchange ideas, expertise, and leads, and to create a collaborative community in support of the business-to-business sector of Marblehead's economy.Membership in Marblehead Professionals is free. There are no dues, no sales pitches, and we host monthly networking events. The really exciting dynamic is all the interactions and activities that occur among members of the group between events.Marblehead has long been a haven for innovative business leaders, and now they have another resource to drive growth and knowledge, through membership in Marblehead Professionals.

Cambridge, Massachusetts

It started with the premise of helping one billion people...I spent almost a decade working at edX to enable access to low-cost, high-quality education for people all over the world. I learned so much about the academic sphere, what makes schools tick, how learners learn, how attention span functions, how the brain ingests, stores, and retrieves information, and why traditional educational models continue to fail us.At edX, I worked with governments, foundations, consortia, enterprises, and universities from concept to deployment on transformational initiatives to stay ahead of what many say is the biggest demographic issue of our time: the growing divide between the current capabilities of today's workforce and the actual capabilities required to be productive in it.I dedicated years to this problem, collaborating with teams worldwide to deliver scalable capabilities for an open-source platform that serves over 40 million learners and thousands of customers daily. I put my hands on the keyboard, my eyes on the data, and my voice on the line to help us move the ball forward. I wore engineering, architecture, analytics, project management, product ownership, and consulting hats while helping coworkers succeed at wearing their own hats.Even though edX is no longer what it once was, I still believe in open-source technology and its communities. I still love opening the hood to tinker and tweak, winning hackathons, and participating in special projects. I still love to operate this way and share what I learn.It was a fascinating journey. I'm so very grateful to edX for enabling this chapter of my career to be written.

Greater Boston Area

I joined Carbonite's Web Team in the spring of 2011 as a Principal Software Engineer, focusing my attention on the suite of middle-tier services supporting our customer-facing portals and machine gateways. After several months of contribution I was offered an opportunity to build a new Core Services team, which would be dedicated to expanding our custom middleware into a robust platform designed to support additional consumers. A year later, my work with Core Services opened the door to a broader role as an Architect with the Office of the CTO. What fun!Our Architecture team was responsible for overseeing the design and delivery of Carbonite's solutions across all of our product lines including Carbonite Online Backup and Carbonite Currents. Additionally we ensured the systems acquired and/or developed for groups such as marketing, eCommerce, operations, and customer support meet their needs. My personal area of focus was with Carbonite's distributed systems and services, which required both business context as well as a breadth of technical skills and knowledge. I was closely involved with our New Ventures group, a team charged with the task of exploring new product concepts and cutting-edge technologies, followed by an exploratory initiative in the on-premise hybrid cloud storage space.The work I did at Carbonite was a perfect mash-up of the roles I'd played and the projects I'd been involved with over the course of my career. And, to top it all off, Carbonite was (and still is!) a progressive organization with solid leadership, talented people, and interesting problems that I felt were worth solving. If you're looking for an awesome place to work, I highly recommend checking out Carbonite!

Greater Boston Area

As the Manager of the EBSCOhost Application Services group, I oversaw a team of technical professionals tasked with delivering the underlying foundation of core processing logic and software services driving EBSCO Publishing's “EBSCOhost” research platform, a web-based application handling millions of transactions each day.I managed and mentored a team of ten highly-skilled engineers responsible for the delivery of software services utilizing the latest technologies from Microsoft, VMWare, Membase/Couchbase, Cisco, DynaTrace, and several major open source projects.Over time, I expanded our team's service lines beyond application development to include solution architecture/design, application performance profiling, third party solution evaluation, and application lifecycle management.My team and I were responsible for innovation on several fronts, including utilization of virtual machines for service delivery, adoption of distributed caching and NoSQL technologies, and implementation of a flexible and scalable continuous integration/deployment processI encouraged my team members to pursue professional development through an innovative peer-based continuous improvement program. This program was extremely successful and required no additional commitment or incentive from the organization.I worked closely with my Director and VP, as well as a host of organization members to define strategic roadmaps, tactical plans, and priorities for my team's projects and services.

Greater Boston Area

As the Solutions Architect for the Seaport Companies, I supported the organization in the areas of enterprise architecture, web application development, infrastructure virtualization, and technology governance. My projects covered a wide range of initiatives in support of electronic business efforts, business process automation, and research into legacy hotel systems, storage virtualization (SANs), and current eCommerce/eBusiness trends in the hospitality industry. I was able to decrease Seaport's eBusiness-related operational expenses by $50,000 in first 30 days by employing industry-accepted hardware consolidation and server virtualization techniquesI had complete responsibility for the product lifecycle and supporting infrastructure for both SeaportBoston.com, Seaport’s primary customer-facing reservation portal, and the 100-unit Seaportal® thin-client deployment available in select rooms at the Seaport HotelI managed a 15-person engineering team comprised of onsite and remotely-located engineers including a team of offshore application developers based in Gurgaon, IndiaI functioned as the primary technical liaison to the Fidelity Investments parent organization for major projects and knowledge-share, specifically with Devonshire Investors and the Fidelity Center for Applied Technology (FCAT)Lastly, but certainly not least, I provided Seaport’s executive leadership team with insight and up-to-date information on eBusiness-related developments and trends in the hospitality industry, placing technical considerations at the forefront of the strategic planning process

Greater Boston Area

I spent approximately two years deep in the trenches of web application development, rolling out website after website for HCPro, and then stepped up into a team lead/coordination role responsible for establishing our technology standards. And, of course, there was still a ton of hands-on programming to be done, with many an all-nighter pulled during these years as we migrated our applications to our custom ecommerce platform.After assuming the Development Manager role, I became completely immersed in the implementation of distributed, service-oriented applications designed to run in both physical and virtual server scenarios. I gained extensive experience constructing and tuning services on the Java platform to produce optimal performance benchmarks in a heterogeneous operating system environment. I was responsible for assembling a team of expert-level application development professionals having extremely specific technical skills.My team and I designed, developed, implemented, and supported HCPro’s service-oriented Java-based electronic business application suite responsible for generating over $17M (30% of revenue) annuallyI managed and mentored HCPro’s eight-person team of expert web application developers, encouraging them to enjoy and excel at their profession by establishing focused responsibilities and a singular development methodology based on industry-recommended and developer-accepted best practicesI envisioned and established a 20-member committee to discover and document HCPro’s business processes, identifying systemic inefficiencies through an improved understanding of organizational policies and procedures in regard to information management and workflowI cultivated an enterprise-oriented mindset in HCPro's technical project management/analysis team and corresponding business units to ensure proper enhancement of the organization’s technical infrastructure and application portfolio via targeted resource planning and proposed initiatives