Matthew MacRae-Bovell

Impact-Driven Software Engineer

A builder at heart, I design and ship developer-facing systems at scale. I care deeply about developer experience, systems thinking, and the craft of constructing reliable systems with agentic best practices.

Coffee Chat

Current Position

GitLab Software Engineer II May 2025 – Present

Availability

Open to Freelance Availability permitting

Updates

Paper accepted to FSE 2026: Declarative Test-Native Software Fault Injection Apr 2026 Published article: A Beginner's Guide to Observability Feb 2026

Joined GitLab Authorization team May 2025

Domain Expertise

Authorization Developer Platform Anti-Abuse Business Automation Multi-tenant Systems

Technical Strengths

Agentic Engineering Systems Thinking Cloud Native Microservices Event-Driven Systems Integrations & APIs

Tech Stack

Languages JavaScriptPythonRubyGolangRust

Agentic Tools Claude CodeCodexMCP

Frontend ReactVue.jsNext.jsSvelte

Backend Ruby on RailsDjangoSpring

Infrastructure DockerKubernetesTerraformRedis

Observability DatadogGrafanaElastic Stack

Work

GitLab Software Engineer II · May 2025 – Present

Member of the Authorization team, responsible for GitLab's access control systems and permission infrastructure across the entire platform.

Fine-Grained Personal Access Tokens Shipped fine-grained PATs for GitLab, letting users scope tokens to specific projects and per-resource permissions rather than broad user-level access.

More coming soon

Jobber Software Engineer II · 2023 – 2025

Focused on platform work across Jobber's field service management product.

Jobber Central Built Jobber Central, a group-level workspace that gives franchise owners and multi-location businesses a single place to monitor performance across all their Jobber accounts.

Automations Built the merchant-facing automation features that let home service businesses automate follow-ups, reminders, payments, and client updates without manual effort.

Developer Platform Owned Jobber's external developer platform, including the GraphQL API, webhooks, and the Developer Center used by third-party app builders.

Zapier Integration Shipped a major new version of the Jobber and Zapier integration, adding 8 new triggers and actions that let small businesses automate more of their day-to-day workflows.

Shopify Software Engineer · 2021 – 2023

Focused on developer-facing products, specifically on the Flow team, contributing to a tool automating millions of tasks within Shopify stores.

Flow Schedules & Data Fetching Shipped scheduled workflow triggers and data fetching capabilities for Shopify Flow, enabling merchants to automate tasks that previously required custom code.

Flow App Extension Framework Contributed to the developer-facing extension system that lets third-party app developers create custom Flow triggers, actions, and templates for merchants.

Flow OpenAI Integration Built the OpenAI integration for Shopify Flow, enabling merchants to generate dynamic AI-powered content directly inside their automation workflows.

Available

Open to Freelance

I take on a limited number of freelance projects, from websites and apps to larger systems, tooling, and technical architecture. If you have something interesting, let's talk.

Get in touch Availability permitting

Writing

February 21, 2026