# Matt Searle

**Engineering Director**

Matt Searle is the Director of Engineering at Conduktor, leading and growing our teams of product and platform engineers to unlock the value of data streaming for our customers. Matt brings 25 years of technical experience as a principal engineer and leader in startups and large enterprises - with a career long focus on high-volume data problems and building and scaling up motivated high performing engineering teams. Matt has been working in depth with Apache Kafka since its beginnings, and is passionate about delivering capabilities for all enterprises to unlock the power of data streaming.

## Articles by Matt Searle

- [Self-Service Kafka Without the Chaos](https://www.conduktor.io/blog/who-needs-self-service-you-do) (2025-09-25) — Kafka self-service with guardrails: Conduktor enables developer autonomy while preventing data chaos, cost overruns, and compliance risks.
- [Why ML Models Fail in Production: The Training Data Mismatch Problem](https://www.conduktor.io/blog/the-hidden-data-gap-that-wrecks-ai-projects) (2025-08-07) — Mismatched training and production data cripples AI models. Real story from a UK lender shows why Conduktor Trust prevents ML pipeline failures.
- [How to Attribute Apache Kafka Costs with Chargeback for Accountability & Better Forecasting](https://www.conduktor.io/blog/tackling-apache-kafka-cost-attribution-with-chargeback) (2024-12-05) — Track Kafka costs by team, domain, or application. Attribute ingress/egress usage to optimize infra and forecast spending.