Matt Cadena — Matt Cadena —

About Me

I'm a senior at Carnegie Mellon,

studying Information Systems.

I play on the men's varsity soccer team,

and I'm passionate about software.

I believe in writing well-structured code

that makes a difference.

Work Experience

Summers of Growth

From Academic Research to Industry Innovation

Over the past few years, I've gained valuable experience in both industry and academia. I recently completed an internship at Nextdoor on the Notifications team. In 2024, I worked as a Software Engineer Intern at Ford, and before that, I was a Research Assistant at Carnegie Mellon University's Institute for Strategy & Technology.

2025 SUMMER

Software Engineer Intern: Nextdoor

On the Notifications team, I contributed to backend systems that deliver personalized, reliable experiences to millions of users. I helped improve ranking logic for Local News emails, boosting engagement with a 14.8% lift in click-through rate, and worked on personalized email campaigns that reached over 10M sends during my time as an intern. I also built an internal React + GraphQL tool that cut ML model debugging time by 97%, enabling the team to ship notification features faster and with greater confidence.

Skills/tools I applied and deepened:

A/B Testing & Experimentation
Data Analytics & Performance Metrics
Scalable Backend Development
React & GraphQL Tooling
System Observability & Debugging

2024 SUMMER

Software Engineer Intern: Ford Motor Company

At Ford, I embraced Test-Driven Development (TDD) and pair programming to craft a React-based tool for Call Center Agents, replacing an outdated system with a streamlined search experience. Tackling a tricky 30-second timer glitch in a Lean Coffee app was another highlight, where our collaborative approach ensured a flawless user experience. Mentoring new interns and guiding them through a thoughtful onboarding process was also a rewarding part of the summer.

Skills/tools I learned and developed:

React
Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
Tekton CI/CD
GitHub Actions
MongoDB
Jotai

2023 SUMMER

Research Assistant: CMU Institute for Strategy & Technology

As a Research Assistant to Professor John Chin at Carnegie Mellon's Institute for Strategy & Technology, I dove into the complex world of self-coups and revolutionary events. I cleaned and analyzed historical data, crafted detailed case studies in LaTeX, and contributed to the Historical Dictionary of Modern Self-Coups by creating bibliographic entries. Researching and writing about the Castro brothers' self-coups was a highlight, weaving their story into the broader tapestry of political upheaval.

Skills/tools I learned and developed:

LaTeX
Historical Research
Professional Writing

Projects

Cool Projects at Nextdoor

As a 2025 summer intern on Nextdoor's Notifications team, I built large-scale personalization features that improved user engagement across millions of daily notifications. Highlights include boosting Local News email CTR by 14.8% through ranking improvements, launching personalized Trending Post emails to 11.6M sends, and creating a React + GraphQL simulator that cut debugging time by 97%.

Learn more about Nextdoor

CX Agent Portal

During my 2024 summer internship at Ford, I redesigned the agent portal for the company's customer service agents. The project involved creating an independent application with a user-friendly UI, incorporating feedback from agents to ensure an optimal experience. The solution was developed to operate without dependency on the existing content management system, which had a pending decommission date, ensuring long-term viability for Ford's customer service operations. Additionally, the application was hosted on Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and we implemented a CI/CD pipeline using Tekton to streamline development and deployment processes.

Jargon Garden

During a team hackathon at my Ford internship, our team created 'Jargon Gardon,' an app that humorously transforms phrases from the user into corporate buzzword gold. Built with React and TypeScript, and powered by Ford's LLM which we connected to through the in-house API, the project was as much about having fun as it was about developing our technical skills. Our playful approach paid off—we won the popular vote for best hackathon project, even though we were the only team made up entirely of interns.

RNN-LM with Self-Attention

To bolster my foundational knowledge of machine learning models and techniques, I built a recurrent neural network language model augmented with scaled dot-product self-attention. I implemented a custom RNNCell, attention mechanisms, and training loops in PyTorch to predict next-token probabilities on the TinyStories dataset. The model handles long-range dependencies by computing attention weights over all previous hidden states at each timestep. Due to CMU's academic integrity policies, the code is in a private repository. If you’d like access, please email me and I can invite you to view the repo.

Email me for access

Gotham City Tracker

As the main project in my 67-272: Application Design and Development, I developed 'Gotham City Department Tracker,' a full-stack CRUD application using Ruby on Rails, React, and MySQL. I led the entire design and development process, starting with creating user stories from a list of functional requirements. Following an incremental, agile approach, I built a custom API, implemented secure authentication, and designed a dynamic UI. The project leveraged MVC architecture for code organization, with MySQL handling database management.

Source code

Dynamic Memory Allocator

As a lower-level project, I implemented a custom 64-bit implicit free-list memory allocator with segregated free lists. The allocator maintains 16-byte alignment, coalesces free blocks, and uses size classes to minimize fragmentation and maximize throughput. Due to CMU’s academic integrity policies, the code is in a private repository. If you’d like access, please email me and I can invite you to view the repo. (Image credit: Bryant and O’Hallaron, Computer Systems: A Programmer’s Perspective, Third Edition)

Email me for access

Personal Website

For this website, I leveraged my experience with React, TypeScript, and Jotai from my internship at Ford to craft a dynamic Next.js web app. Using Framer Motion and GSAP, I created a captivating display that highlights my exploration of new frontend and design techniques. The result is a visually engaging and technically sophisticated site that reflects my growth and creativity in web development.

Source code