Allison Matlack is a leader focused on engineering culture, organizational health, and the human side of technology. She currently serves as Director of Engineering Operations & Strategy at McGraw Hill, where she helps engineering leaders build the conditions for their teams to do their best work.
Before McGraw Hill, Allison was Head of Engineering Culture & Programs at Block, ensuring that teams, work, and culture thrived within an ecosystem of thousands of engineers creating tools to expand economic access. Her time at Block followed a role as Technical Business Operations Manager at GitHub, where she focused on internal communications, culture, and change management for the engineering organization and helped shape organizational communications strategies. Earlier, she spent nearly 12 years at Red Hat, most recently leading the global Products and Technologies Communications team — playing a pivotal role in internal communications during the Red Hat / IBM acquisition, establishing the company’s first executive communications team, and, the accomplishment she’s most proud of, following through on six years of persistent effort to allow updating of name-based kerberos IDs in support of diversity and inclusion programs, requiring collaboration with stakeholders across multiple organizations and 200+ impacted applications.
Described by peers as “the powerhouse and heart of an organization,” Allison is a vocal advocate for open decision-making, transparent communications, and empowerment. She has served as an Open Organization Ambassador since 2016, promoting the collaborative principles of open source software development in various contexts.
Allison holds an M.A. from West Virginia University in Professional Writing and Editing. Her thesis, Rhetorical Bridges: How Rhetoric Affects the Gap Between Knowledge and Behavior Change, was inspired by her service as a Peace Corps Volunteer and proposes a tailored interactive health communication website that demonstrates how rhetoric, viewed as a fluid dynamic between practical art and hermeneutic tool, can help bridge the gap between knowledge and behavior change.
Full resume coming soon eventually, but for now, you can find it on LinkedIn.
About this site
All opinions expressed on this site represent those of the author, and not those of any employer, group, or organization. Site code is available on GitHub and licensed under the MIT license; all original content is licensed under Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 attributable to Allison Matlack.