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Dynamic technology leader with over 20 years of experience in engineering and product…
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Matt Roman reposted thisMatt Roman reposted thisBig moment for KWI. AI Product Image Search has been named Overall RetailTech Innovation of the Year in the 2026 RetailTech Breakthrough Awards. 🏆 It was recognized as the innovation moving retail forward. We designed it to solve a very real in-store problem: associates having to step away from a customer just to identify a product. Instead, they can take a single photo and get an instant match, without breaking the moment. In production with Pandora US, product lookup time dropped by 66 percent. “The biggest priority for us is more time with fan engagement. If you lose that relationship because you have to walk away to find something, you lose the moment.” - Detria Courtalis, VP of Sales, Pandora US Thank you to the entire Pandora team for partnering with us and helping bring this to life in stores. That idea of keeping associates present with customers is what drove this from the beginning, and it’s what makes this recognition meaningful for us. Thank you to the RetailTech Breakthrough team and to the customers who helped shape this alongside us, and congratulations to all of this year's winners. Full announcement in the comments.
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Matt Roman reposted thisMatt Roman reposted thisKWI is on a roll, and we're building the team to match! 📈 We're #hiring for a Director of Customer Acquisition based in Melville, NY: a strategic, driven leader ready to shape how we bring our retail technology to more brands. Apply or tag someone you know who should. #RetailTech #NY #CustomerAcquisition #NowHiring
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Matt Roman reposted thisMatt Roman reposted thisIf you're attending NRF, join our head of product Scott Matza, Monday 5p at the AI in Retail discussion with Detria Courtalis at Pandora at the AI in Retail Conference & Gala - Lavan Midtown, 641 W 42nd St. See how Pandora is using AI Image Search to completely reshape in-store selling. RSVP here: https://lnkd.in/e6_FdPZp See you there! #NRF #RetailTech #NRF2026 #NationalRetailFederation
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Matt Roman reposted thisMatt Roman reposted thisThe brands redefining customer-centered retail will be in SoHo during NRF 2026. Will you be there? Pandora one of the world’s most iconic jewelry brands will be featured on KWI’s NRF store tour this Sunday, showcasing how AI can remove friction from the shopper experience and give associates something priceless back: time with the customer. Inside Pandora stores, associates aren’t just selling jewelry. They’re helping customers celebrate birthdays, anniversaries, and milestones. But when product lookups took over a minute, those moments were at risk. By partnering with KWI and Emmet Software Labs for launching its AI Product Image Search, Pandora: • Reduced product lookup time by 66% • Saved ~30 seconds per item added to cart • Cut item-to-cart time in half • Trained associates in under 5 minutes The result? Faster checkout, frictionless conversations, and more room for storytelling, all without disrupting the in-store experience. (Full case study here: https://lnkd.in/exuq4ex9) Want to see it in action, RSVP for our SoHo Store Tour 📆 Sunday, Jan 11, 2026 🎟️ Experience how Pandora uses AI to make retail more human, not less. 👉 Signup >> https://lnkd.in/eszad-Cd #NRF2026 #RetailInnovation #AIinRetail #FutureOfRetail #UnifiedCommerce #CustomerExperience
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Matt Roman reposted thisMatt Roman reposted this🚨 National Retail Federation 2026 starts Sunday. Connect with us: 1️⃣ Sun-Tue Visit us at Booth #5165 for live demos and 40+ years of retail authority. Come meet our crew! https://lnkd.in/eU6izjuw 2️⃣ Sun at 9:30am SoHo store tour featuring Pandora, Ulla Johnson, and John Varvatos, A.L.C. See AI and unified commerce in the wild. https://lnkd.in/eggWP7dk 3️⃣ Mon at 11:20am AI Roundtable at the River Pavilion, Snowflake Stage. Join Matt Roman for one of the most grounded AI conversations at NRF. 4️⃣ Mon at 5pm AI in Retail Conference & Gala Panel Discussion featuring Detria Courtalis from Pandora and our head of product Scott Matza Sign up here: https://lnkd.in/e6_FdPZp
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Matt Roman reposted thisMatt Roman reposted thisHeaded to NRF next week? Join our CTO Matt Roman at 11:20am at the River Pavilion, Snowflake Stage for an in-depth AI in retail roundtable discussion. You won’t want to miss this! See you there! 👉 https://lnkd.in/edaQjnth
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Matt Roman reposted thisMatt Roman reposted this🚨 Staff Engineer Wanted - Help Us Shape the Future of Retail Tech 🛍️💻 We're on the hunt for a Staff Engineer ready to take the lead in solving high-impact problems at the intersection of tech and retail. Based in Melville, NY (Long Island) with a flexible hybrid schedule, our team is building cutting-edge solutions that power the retail experiences you know and love — and we need a technical leader who can guide architecture, elevate engineering standards, and drive cross-functional collaboration. What you'll do: ✅ Architect scalable systems used by major retail brands ✅ Mentor and uplevel engineers across the org ✅ Collaborate closely with product & design to shape what's next ✅ Influence technical direction and build for the long-term Why us? 🔹 Profitable, fast-moving company 🔹 Hybrid schedule with a supportive, tight-knit team 🔹 Big enough to have an impact, small enough to move fast This is more than a role — it’s a chance to own, lead, and build with purpose. 📩 Ready to chat? Apply below 👇 #StaffEngineer #RetailTech #LongIslandTech #TechLeadership #NowHiring #EngineeringCareers #HybridWork
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Matt Roman liked thisMatt Roman liked thisI'm excited to share that I've joined Alloy as a Senior Product Operations Manager. Throughout my career, I've been drawn to opportunities where strong operational systems can help teams move faster, make better decisions, and deliver greater impact. Alloy's mission, commitment to building best-in-class compliance products, and people-first culture made this an easy next step. I'm looking forward to partnering across Product, Engineering, and the broader organization to help scale the processes, insights, and operating rhythms that enable great products and great teams. A special thank you to Rose Reilly and Faria Chaudhry for a thoughtful and welcoming hiring experience. Excited for what's ahead.
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Matt Roman liked thisMatt Roman liked thisTom Ford Fashion. Pandora. Bluemercury. Hurley. So many brands and specialty retailers that are world-renowned, household names today initially started their partnership with KWI when their growth was really just getting started. Our new case study with Tom Ford Fashion, for example, captures what 14 years with KWI looks like from the retailer's side: you'll hear from store directors, operations, the women's buying office, and leadership. There's a reason why our average customer partnership is 15 years. We were built for specialty retail, and we keep building for the brands that grow with us. Read the full story: https://lnkd.in/efabjbKJ #LuxuryRetail #RetailTech #SpecialtyRetail
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Matt Roman liked thisMatt Roman liked thisWelcome Jorge Barrera, our new Vice President of Infrastructure and Operations! Jorge brings over 15 years of experience building and scaling cloud platforms across AWS, Azure, and hybrid environments. Most recently at Saks Global, where he focused on cloud infrastructure and platform engineering at enterprise retail scale. His focus will be on driving the reliability, scalability, and operational excellence that power KWI's continued growth, with an eye toward modernizing how we build and operate at scale. #RetailTech #TeamKWI #Infrastructure
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Matt Roman liked thisMatt Roman liked thisBig moment for KWI. AI Product Image Search has been named Overall RetailTech Innovation of the Year in the 2026 RetailTech Breakthrough Awards. 🏆 It was recognized as the innovation moving retail forward. We designed it to solve a very real in-store problem: associates having to step away from a customer just to identify a product. Instead, they can take a single photo and get an instant match, without breaking the moment. In production with Pandora US, product lookup time dropped by 66 percent. “The biggest priority for us is more time with fan engagement. If you lose that relationship because you have to walk away to find something, you lose the moment.” - Detria Courtalis, VP of Sales, Pandora US Thank you to the entire Pandora team for partnering with us and helping bring this to life in stores. That idea of keeping associates present with customers is what drove this from the beginning, and it’s what makes this recognition meaningful for us. Thank you to the RetailTech Breakthrough team and to the customers who helped shape this alongside us, and congratulations to all of this year's winners. Full announcement in the comments.
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Matt Roman liked thisMatt Roman liked thisHiring: a product designer who treats Figma Make and Claude Code like coworkers. Because they are. I’m on the product team at KWI and I’m looking for my next design partner. Our last designer was incredible and I want to find someone just as strong who’s ready to help us push into what’s next. We’re going all in on spec-driven development and AI-powered workflows Claude Code, Figma Make, structured specs that take the guesswork out of building. I want someone who gets fired up about that and helps galvanize the whole team around it. You’d own design systems, drive SDD across product areas, and use AI to move faster without sacrificing craft. This is complex unified commerce — POS, merchandising, eCommerce, CRM — for brands like Pandora, Bluemercury, and Tom Ford. Come build with us!
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Matt Roman liked thisMatt Roman liked thisThe most expensive technology decision a brand or retailer makes isn't the one they agonize over. It's the one they don't. I've been in retail technology for over 40 years. And the pattern I keep seeing, the one that costs retailers the most, isn't a bad implementation or a failed integration. It's the moment a growing brand chooses a platform because it works well enough right now. "We'll figure out the rest later." Later arrives faster than you think. At 5-10 stores, the gaps are manageable. There are manual workarounds, a few spreadsheets, a team willing to hustle through the friction. Nobody notices the cracks because the business is still small enough to run on goodwill and effort. The problem is that growth doesn't fix those gaps - it exposes them. By the time you're at 50 stores, you have three vendors pointing at each other when something breaks, store data that doesn't talk to your online data, and customers returning items in-store that they bought online while your associate stares at a screen that has no record of the transaction. Your inventory numbers become a best guess rather than a source of truth. And the painful irony is that you're not failing because you made a bad decision. You're failing because you made a good enough one. The retailers I've watched scale cleanly, from 50 stores to 500, from regional to national to global, didn't get there because they had the biggest budgets or the flashiest technology. They got there because early on they made a decision about what kind of foundation they were building on, and they refused to compromise it for the sake of short-term convenience or a lower price point. They also did something else that almost nobody talks about. They chose a platform that gave them real flexibility in how it was configured, and whose costs scaled with the business instead of against it. When they were 20 stores, they set it up for how they operated at 20 stores. And then, as they grew, they went back and reconfigured it to support how they operated as a bigger business. The economics didn’t punish them for growing. The platform grew alongside them. Very few retailers do this. Most set it up once and never touch it again. Then one day they look up and realize their system doesn’t do the things they need it to do anymore. The platform didn’t fail them. They just never went back and told it who they’d become, and now it now longer matches their new reality. Unified commerce isn't a feature you add when you're ready. It's a decision you make before you need it - because by the time you need it, it's already too late to avoid the cost of not having it. You can patch the gaps later, or you can not have them in the first place. I've watched both paths play out over four decades. Only one of them is actually cheaper.
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Matt Roman liked thisMatt Roman liked thisSupporting our retail customers takes the right people, not just the right technology. Welcome Austin Peraza to the KWI team as a Retail Support Specialist. Austin brings a fresh perspective and a genuine interest in retail technology. We're looking forward to seeing him grow here. #TeamKWI #RetailTech #CustomerSuccess
Experience & Education
Projects
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Epsilon
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See projectAn implementation of the epsilon greedy algorithm. It automatically selects the best performing versions of your webpage and serves them most often, while randomly testing other versions.
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