About Me

Hello, I'm Matt. I live in the San Francisco Bay Area. I received my PhD in optical communications from Princeton University, and my professional career has been split between building wireless interfaces for wearables and photonic integrated circuits for datacenter interconnects. I'm currently making a career transition from hardware to machine learning software and am actively seeking opportunities. I am a deep believer of fundamentals and data-driven problem solving. I am motivated by building product, and have a deep appreciation not only for technical excellence, but also efficient business operations and transparent communication.

I have management experience. At Luminous Computing, I recruited a team of 9 engineers from scratch, and led them through the design and test of three silicon photonics tapeouts, culminating in the first monolithically integrated 112 Gbps PAM4 transceiver chips My management skillset includes budgeting, project management, recruiting, and team-building. I believe that strong technical leadership is important to communicate effectively with engineers, help them prioritize and grow, and make strategic decisions under resource constraints.

Outside of work, I love playing basketball and have followed the NBA since I was a child. My favorite team of all time were the 2003-2004 Pistons, because they had no superstar but played gritty defense with final scores hovering in the 70-80s. Other than that, I am a Spurs fan. Times have been tough, but Wemby brings hope.

Three years ago I transitioned from being a runner to a swimmer. There are two aspects of swimming that I really like: (1) the focus on technique to make my body as efficient as possible in the water and (2) the meditative effect when I'm underwater and everything is quiet. I recently swam from Alcatraz Island back to San Francisco, which was my first open-ocean swim.

I have two kittens, Tofu and ChiChi, who I adopted in September 2023. They were once feral kittens, who have since mastered the craft of engineering humans to get whatever they want.

You can reach me through LinkedIn or email me at mpchang17@gmail.com