Allison Matlack is currently Head of Engineering Culture & Programs at Block, where she’s focused on ensuring that teams, work, and culture thrive within an ecosystem of nearly 5,000 engineers creating tools to expand economic access.
Before joining Block, Allison was a Technical Business Operations Manager at GitHub, the world’s largest software development platform. There, she focused on internal communications, culture, and change management for the engineering organization, playing a key role in shaping organizational communications strategies and enhancing organizational health.
Prior to GitHub, Allison spent nearly 12 years at Red Hat, most recently as lead of the global Products and Technologies Communications team. She played a pivotal role in internal communications and change management during the Red Hat / IBM acquisition, and later established and led the company’s first executive communications team. In addition to creating the pilot that grew into the company’s global mentoring program, the accomplishment Allison is most proud of from her tenure at Red Hat is following through on six years of persistent effort to allow for 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.