Joel Birchler

About Joel Birchler

I\'m a compassionate, people-centered engineering leader with a deep technical background as a software architect and developer. I build and scale teams, continuously improve processes, and foster a culture of collaboration and innovation. I love working with smart people on hard problems.At Red Hat, I led a team of platform engineers and application developers building the infrastructure automation and developer tooling that supports Red Hat’s $140M commercial training business.I’m also proud of my work as a Technical Director at Symantec where I spearheaded an agile/devOps transformation across 10+ engineering teams. This multi-year effort to build world-class engineering practices resulted in daily deployment frequency, reduced infrastructure costs, and (here’s the big one) was instrumental in implementing the integrations we needed to meet our LifeLock acquisition timelines.As Director of Engineering at DECK Monitoring, I led the solar/renewable energy startup from market proof-of-concept to market leader. Scaling the architecture of a highly-available near real-time analytics platform was like changing the engines on a jet while keeping it in the air– and I loved every minute of it.Expertise- Engineering leadership and organizational management- Vision and strategy creation and communication- Building relationships across the company- Building and coaching dev teams- Scaling software architecture- Software engineering methodologies and continuous delivery- Cloud Engineering, DevOps, SRE, Azure, AWS- High-availability, reliability practices, resilient systems- I think Kubernetes is pretty great (at scale)- Systems thinking and process improvement- AI/ML architecture and operations- Managing remote + distributed teams- M&A integrationPassions- Climate change / sustainability / green tech- Music / guitar / synths- Astronomy- Process + system improvement

Experience

1. Senior Software Engineering Manager, Pillar Lead

   Planet

   Feb 2026 — Present

   Lead teams responsible for access, user management, and usage tracking.

Education

• Goshen College

  Bachelor of Arts (BA), Interdisc (Computer Science, Art, Writing) + Communication majors

  1997 — 2002

Skills

• Javascript
• Css
• Jquery
• Ruby
• Ruby on Rails
• Git
• Html
• Project Management
• Web Development
• Agile Methodologies
• Scrum
• User Interface
• Product Development
• Management
• Engineering Management
• Software Engineering Practices
• Linux
• Embedded Systems
• Programming
• Mysql
• Testing
• Software Development
• Software Engineering
• Android
• Mobile Applications
• Agile Project Management
• Web Applications
• Ajax
• Html 5
• Kubernetes
• Docker
• React.js
• Microsoft Azure
• Microservices
• Software Architecture