Joel van Velden

Platform Engineering Team Lead @Motorway

London, GB

Manager of Platform Engineering team. Reporting to VP of Engineering. Since joining to establish the Platform Engineering function at Motorway, I\'ve grown the team from 1 contractor to 5 permanent. Part way through a major re-platform from Heroku to AWS Fargate. My responsibilities include- Defining the vision for Platform Infrastructure at Motorway and setting a product-led roadmap- Owning delivery of our roadmap and project dependencies - Defining the interview process and hiring for Platform Engineers into the team - Inputting into budgets and forecasting costs - Project delivery - Coaching and mentoring of reports, regular 1:1s - Writing business cases to justify new teams / re-prioritisation of work / new vendor and budgets / build in-house. Projects include- Introduced tracing using Datadog APM - Set the direction for developing our bespoke release manager system - Moved logging from ELK to Datadog Logs to provider a better developer experience at lower cost- Providing the best terraform experience possible using Spacelift AWS / ECS / Fargate / Terraform / PostgreSQL / DynamoDB / GitHub Actions / Datadog / Spacelift