Matthew Nichols

About Matthew Nichols

At Kukun, we are creating innovative property and finance technology. Our systems process gigabytes of government, real estate, and homeowner data through AI models, and then craft the resulting insights into scalable APIs for our partners and our own websites and apps. We use technologies like containerized microservices, parallel data processing engines, distributed file systems, and modern web and native app development frameworks.Our mission is to transform home ownership, providing the knowledge and tools each homeowner needs to profitably invest in and maintain their home while generating wealth. Our data and analytics products also serve leading companies in the investment, real estate, construction, and banking industries.If you are interested in any of these areas, I\'d love to talk.

Experience

1. VP of Engineering

   Kukun

   Feb 2022 — Present · Menlo Park, CA, US

   As VP of Engineering for a property tech startup reporting to the CEO, I steer technical strategy and lead development teams to deliver B2B and B2C products that provide homeowners and investors with AI-driven insights for profitable financial decisions.Responsibilities & Accomplishments:• Shaped technology strategy and system architecture, modernized LAMP stack to React and Next.js, created scalable data platform using BigQuery and Airflow, and drove AWS-to-Google Cloud migration, saving one year of infrastructure costs• Modernized engineering practices: led adoption of AI-assisted development with Github Copilot, Claude Sonnet, and Grok Code; championed DevOps culture to optimize cloud infrastructure and reduce spend by 74%; instituted a test automation strategy; adopted Terraform for infrastructure-as-code; established data-driven monitoring; and automated web traffic management• Built “Kukun Homes: AI for House Hunters” iPhone app as lead developer, architect, and product manager, from concept to 1.0 release. Integrated SwiftUI, Core Data & Google Gemini 2.5 AI• Spearheaded generative AI integration into new and existing products for property and permit analysis; developed proofs-of-concept using LLaMA for text analysis and Gemini for images• Collaborated with COO and VP of Data Science to align product and data science strategies with technical vision, took ownership of machine learning pipelines using XGBoost and regression models, ensuring seamless integration and execution of strategic initiatives

Education

• University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  MS, Electrical and Computer Engineering

  2004 — 2006

• Northeastern University

  BS, Electrical Engineering

  1999 — 2004