Matisse is available for hire
Hire MatisseMatisse VerDuyn
Verified Expert in Engineering
Full-stack and API Developer
Jacksonville, FL, United States
Toptal member since February 5, 2014
Bio
Matisse architects enterprise AI systems: a Fortune 100 defense contractor made him their first approved AI vendor after the fastest offline/on-premise deployment their team had ever seen, fully air-gapped with local LLM inference. He created URQ.ai, where one schema generates the entire stack and every endpoint becomes an MCP tool. He builds agent-first with Claude Code, hardens vibe-coded MVPs into production, and brings 15+ years of Node.js, TypeScript, React, and AWS architecture.
Portfolio
Consumer SaaS Venture
Node.js, JavaScript, React, Firebase, AWS Lambda, Amazon DynamoDB...
Enterprise AI Platform
Node.js, AWS Lambda, Amazon API Gateway, AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK), React...
Startup Incubators & Developer Communities
Technical Leadership, Software Architecture, Startups, Node.js...
Experience
- Software Architecture - 15 years
- JavaScript - 14 years
- Full-stack - 14 years
- Node.js - 10 years
- Amazon Web Services (AWS) - 8 years
- React - 8 years
- Claude Code - 2 years
- AI Agents - 1 year
Preferred Environment
Amazon Web Services (AWS), Node.js, TypeScript, React, Claude Code, Serverless, Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI), Firebase, SQL, Full-stack
The most amazing...
...thing: I shipped a fully air-gapped enterprise AI platform with local LLM inference at a Fortune 100 defense contractor, as their first approved AI vendor.
Work Experience
Founder and Principal Engineer
2026 - PRESENT
Consumer SaaS Venture
- Founded and operate a revenue-generating consumer SaaS entirely solo — a scientifically validated psychometric assessment with AI-generated premium reports, four payment methods, and automated lifecycle email; typically a small team's workload.
- Orchestrated three LLM providers (Gemini, GPT-4o, Grok) to generate seven premium AI report types, cross-validated against a facet-level compatibility framework, with time-based promotional pricing computed server-side.
- Grew the site to 1,000 users in its first month on under $20 per day of Google Ads, then raised paid-landing conversion from roughly 30% to 48% at $0.75 per completed conversion through funnel instrumentation, journey analysis, and A/B testing.
- Moved all conversion tracking server-side (GA4 Measurement Protocol) so bidding survives ad blockers, built end-to-end attribution for every signup and payment, and detected and neutralized competitor click fraud via server-log forensics.
- Replaced a content team with automation: 500+ short-form videos produced end-to-end at roughly $0.28 per acquired subscriber.
- Built growth automation across 12 social platforms with AI-drafted, human-approved publishing, and a serverless cold-email platform on AWS whose bot-filtered analytics exposed automated scanners inflating open rates 16x.
- Unified Puppeteer, Playwright, and Selenium behind a single driver abstraction reusing authenticated browser sessions, with per-platform rate limits, universal deduplication, and an engagement scraper tracking 1,200+ published posts.
- Orchestrated four coordinated AI agents covering the full business lifecycle — video, payments, outreach, and distribution — with shared data contracts so each channel's metrics steer the other channels' content strategy.
- Built a lead-generation platform that passively collects a company's social data as users browse, builds a graph of the extended network to surface high-quality leads, and manages them in an internal CRM, modeling interactions as connected nodes.
- Developed a research engine that infers a complete 30-facet personality profile from a person's public writing using computational linguistics plus a three-LLM consensus protocol, validated against 460+ ground-truth assessment profiles.
Technologies: Node.js, JavaScript, React, Firebase, AWS Lambda, Amazon DynamoDB, AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK), Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI), AI Agents, Claude Code, Puppeteer, Selenium
Founder and CTO
2025 - PRESENT
Enterprise AI Platform
- Architected and delivered an enterprise AI knowledge platform for a Fortune 100 defense contractor, in what their team called the fastest offline/on-premise deployment they had ever completed, and became the company's first approved AI vendor.
- Unified Salesforce, SharePoint, Confluence, Jira, GitHub Enterprise, Bitbucket, Google Drive, OneDrive, S3, Asana, and more into a single AI-searchable knowledge base with a chat interface and LLM-generated documents grounded in customer data.
- Built custom integrations for anything without a public connector by wrapping legacy APIs into composable modules that extend their functionality without modifying or breaking the underlying system.
- Engineered one codebase that deploys two ways with zero source edits: serverless on AWS (Lambda, API Gateway, RDS, S3 via CDK) or as a fully air-gapped on-premise bundle with local LLM inference via Ollama — no internet required at any point.
- Built the entire platform on the URQ.ai framework (architecture-as-JSON code generation, driven through an MCP server operated by Claude and Claude Code).
- Eliminated AI vendor lock-in with a provider-agnostic abstraction spanning eight interchangeable backends (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Cohere, Grok, Azure, Ollama, and a native engine), hot-swappable per organization without code changes.
- Shipped and maintained 50+ independently deployable microservices (around 150 data-extraction endpoints) with six build profiles per service, from development through multiple on-premise customer environments.
Technologies: Node.js, AWS Lambda, Amazon API Gateway, AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK), React, Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI), Model Context Protocol (MCP), OAuth 2
CTO in Residence and Community Leader
2024 - PRESENT
Startup Incubators & Developer Communities
- Coached roughly two dozen early-stage startups over two accelerator cohorts, with strategic guidance and hands-on troubleshooting across product-market fit, growth strategy, fundraising, tech stack, scaling, and cybersecurity.
- Audited portfolio companies' codebases and wrote actionable development plans with milestones, deliverables, and time assessments; fielded technical due diligence on the founders' behalf in investor meetings.
- Ran the day-to-day of the accelerator program: talks, office hours, pitch feedback, and a founders' mastermind.
- Wrote internal software for the accelerator and helped portfolio companies build their web and mobile applications.
- Developed and maintained relationships with founders and investors across the startup ecosystem.
- Mentored a first-time founder one-on-one, from idea validation through early product and hiring decisions.
- Led the Node.js community across Toptal's global talent network.
- Grew the Node.js Slack community from the bottom of the engagement rankings to the top in every measured category (active users, posts, reactions, and comments) within two months.
- Built a business networking community of 5,000 Meetup members.
- Hosted a weekly networking event at Topgolf that drew 10 to 20 new business owners every week, a steady pipeline of introductions to local companies.
Technologies: Technical Leadership, Software Architecture, Startups, Node.js, Community Leadership, Business Development, Networking, Lead Generation
CTO
2022 - PRESENT
URQ.ai
- Created the application operating system: as an OS makes programs portable across hardware, URQ.ai makes applications portable across infrastructure — one codebase deploys from SQLite to PostgreSQL, local filesystem to AWS Lambda.
- Designed the schema-driven core: define a schema once, and the database, APIs, types, and UI generate themselves — 99.8% fewer lines of code and 80% fewer AI tokens than an equivalent Next.js implementation.
- Brought OOP to distributed systems: APIs behave as inheritable classes with persistent state and callable behavior, services compose through configuration, and legacy APIs wrap into modules without modification: no rewrite to modernize and integrate.
- Made the framework AI-native by default: every generated endpoint automatically becomes an MCP-compatible tool callable by Claude, GPT, or any AI assistant.
- Ran the development lifecycle itself agent-first: the framework's MCP server exposes architecture-as-JSON generation as tools, so Claude Code scaffolds, extends, and refactors entire applications end to end under human review.
- Built for secure environments with an offline-first architecture that compiles and deploys fully air-gapped, with no external dependencies.
- Proved the framework in production: the enterprise AI platform delivered to a Fortune 100 defense contractor runs entirely on URQ.ai.
Technologies: Node.js, JavaScript, Vue, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon DynamoDB, AWS Lambda, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), HTML, CSS, REST, Responsive Web Design (RWD), React, Full-stack, Web Development, APIs, Architecture, CI/CD Pipelines, Microservices, TypeScript, Model Context Protocol (MCP)
Front-end Senior Software Engineer
2015 - PRESENT
Freelance (via Toptal)
- Built offline-first touch panel web applications for home automation and security that controlled multiple types of IoT devices and kept working without an internet connection.
- Developed multiple administration panels, membership-subscription, and marketplace web applications for productivity, commerce, domotics, video streaming, and communication.
- Deployed and operated the delivery infrastructure on AWS: Route 53 DNS, CloudFront CDN, S3 hosting, and certificate management.
- Simplified front-end framework development with custom state management libraries and CSS themes.
Technologies: Adobe Photoshop, Amazon Route 53, AWS Certificate Manager, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), Amazon CloudFront CDN, JavaScript, CSS, HTML, Vue, Responsive Web Design (RWD), Internet of Things (IoT), Home Automation
Back-end Senior Software Engineer
2015 - PRESENT
Freelance (via Toptal)
- Built administration panels for managing content, databases, moderation, file uploading, video streaming, and companion customer-facing websites.
- Owned DevOps for every engagement: CI/CD pipelines, cloud infrastructure on AWS and GCP, Linux administration on VM providers like DigitalOcean, and production database operations on MariaDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and TimescaleDB.
- Implemented payment systems for both membership-subscription and marketplace sites via Stripe and PayPal.
- Developed custom authentication with multi-factor authentication and notification services via email and SMS.
Technologies: Amazon Web Services (AWS), MariaDB, AWS Certificate Manager, Amazon API Gateway, Amazon Route 53, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), Amazon DynamoDB, MySQL, Node.js, REST, GraphQL, DevOps, CI/CD Pipelines
Web Developer
2009 - 2017
Oppo Boppo, LLC
- Developed an MLB PITCHf/x spider, data mining, and predictive analytics.
- Built iOS games for brain training, education, and entertainment.
- Created custom small business pay-per-page static websites.
- Developed WordPress websites for small businesses, including eCommerce with PayPal.
- Built landing and splash pages with email collection for mailing lists.
- Scraped art gallery data and thumbs from the client's old website, all HTML, to reformat for their new website's database.
Technologies: JavaScript, MySQL
Founder
2012 - 2016
Permamarks
- Built a fast and reliable web page archiver with social bookmarking, URL index, and search.
- Created a portable and easily reusable back-end for a social network with members, followers or following, blocking, flagging, and comments.
- Developed a Google Analytics integrated profile statistics dashboard.
- Integrated a RESTful API with developer access through tokens and token secrets.
- Implemented PayPal recurring payments at multiple payment levels with free trials.
Technologies: Amazon Web Services (AWS), JavaScript, MySQL
Experience
Aureum
https://github.com/matisseverduyn/aureum/Perfect formatting and readable text that adapts automatically to every screen size. Aureum uses the golden ratio to simplify responsive web design, which keeps class definition requirements to a minimum, making HTML and stylesheets cleaner and more manageable.
Permamarks
Save a complete copy of any webpage. Permamarks was a web archiving tool that enabled users to create a full, working archive of their bookmarks while preserving the integrity of the CSS rules and certain JavaScript functionality.
Scramblage
Send password-protected photos to anyone. Scramblage uses a proprietary algorithm to encrypt images, keeping them shareable as PNGs of the same dimensions but not viewable unless you know the password to decrypt.
StatFreak
An MLB pitch sequence research and prediction tool. Using pitch data, the PITCHf/x database, StatFreak could predict the next pitch type and location during a live at-bat, given the history of the pitcher and their relationship to the batter and other similar batters.
Backyard Bandits
A game where a gang of squirrel backyard bandits are after the player's dog bones. Players can move the dog around the screen to catch the pesky critters in the act, collect acorns to purchase upgrades and unlock new characters, grab power-ups for an in-game boost, and avoid getting sprayed by a skunk.
Pixits
A game where Pixit-making machines push Pixits from pumps at the top of the assembly lines and collect them in bins at the bottom. The problem is the machines aren't as reliable as they used to be, and sometimes, Pixits don't match the color of their bin, so players need to sort out the duds.
SQ Game
The player has a set of lights, but they're turned off. One by one, the player tries to turn them on, only to realize there's more to it than a few easy clicks—the wires have been crossed. The player must find and remember the connections to complete the round in the fewest moves possible.
Skills
Libraries/APIs
Node.js, Vue, React, PayPal API, jQuery, Puppeteer
Tools
Amazon CloudFront CDN, Adobe Photoshop, Claude Code, AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK)
Languages
CSS, HTML, JavaScript, GraphQL, PHP, C, C++, Perl, Objective-C, TypeScript, SQL
Paradigms
Responsive Web Design (RWD), REST, Microservices, Responsive, Model Context Protocol (MCP), DevOps
Platforms
Amazon Web Services (AWS), AWS Lambda, Rackspace, Rackspace Cloud, Firebase
Storage
MariaDB, MySQL, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), PostgreSQL
Frameworks
Angular, Selenium, OAuth 2
Other
AWS Certificate Manager, Amazon Route 53, Amazon API Gateway, Full-stack, Web Development, APIs, Architecture, CI/CD Pipelines, AI Architecture, PayPal, Web Scraping, Serverless, Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI), Internet of Things (IoT), Home Automation, Technical Leadership, Software Architecture, Startups, Community Leadership, Business Development, Networking, Lead Generation, AI Agents
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