Matt Andrews

Engineering Manager, Organizations

Hello! I'm Matt, an Engineering Manager at GitLab. I joined the company in March 2025 and I live in Birmingham, UK with my partner and our children.

This is not a "Manager README".

"Manager Readmes" have a mixed reputation, so I'm avoiding writing a well-intentioned list of all my flaws and preferences. This document is just a short introduction to me as a human being, for practical purposes only. Onwards!

Quick career summary

I've been an engineering manager for around seven years as of 2025. I previously worked at a bunch of news organisations (the Economist, the Guardian, the BBC) and have managed engineers working on high-traffic, high-scale webapps.

I started my engineering career as a front-end developer back in the days when IE6 was still a thing and jQuery was a game-changing revolution. Over time I became more experienced with back-end (Python, Node, some Ruby) and DevOps, and I still enjoy poking around with these things in my spare time.

What I try to do as a manager

As a manager, I really enjoy helping engineers progress their careers and reach their personal goals. In previous roles, my teams have praised my honesty, listening skills, and support. I try to make team environments open, collaborative and fun – I don't think you can reach true psychological safety as a team until you can make stupid jokes and laugh with each other. I'm also very happy to ask "dumb" questions and normalise not understanding things – we're all learners, right?

How I work

I have two young kids (my son Ted is nearly 6 and my daughter Robin is almost 2). I do the school drop-off and pick-up which bookend my working hours, so I'm usually around 9am-5pm. I will periodically check in on work messages in my evenings if I need to monitor something, but in general I value family time and don't expect anyone to check messages outside their normal hours unless something is urgently broken.

I like meeting new people and talking about anything, so feel free to book a coffee chat with me.

Trivia

I love music and have released a couple of home-recorded albums under my musical alias "Unfuture". I run a music webzine called Scene Point Blank which I started as a teenager in 2003 and is still going today.

I work from my garden shed which I converted to a home office / music studio in early 2024.

I write a lot and send a weekly newsletter called "Man Feelings" about, well, being a man (and having feelings). I also write about parenting on my blog "Yawn of the Dad", and general tech writing on my personal site.

Links

• LinkedIn
• BlueSky