Decision story
17-person platform organization supporting 140+ engineers across 21–24 squads
Building a Platform Organization at Scale
A scalable platform operating model that keeps delivery velocity as the organization grows
This case study describes prior operating experience that informs Lirado Tech’s current practice. Lirado Tech was not the original contracting entity.
Business Context
A growing engineering organization needed stronger platform capability as it scaled past 100 engineers across more than 20 squads. Platform work was fragmented across individual contributors and reactive support models.
Platform Bottleneck
The bottleneck was organizational maturity. Platform capability needed to scale beyond individual contributors and ad-hoc support. The organization required leadership, team structure, ownership, governance, and platform strategy across multi-account AWS and hundreds of applications.
Why It Was Difficult
Platform adoption fails when ownership is unclear, tooling is inconsistent, and teams have no shared operating model. Modernizing delivery without disrupting ongoing product work required sequencing, stakeholder alignment, and organizational mechanisms—not only technical changes.
Role and Responsibility
Led the design and build of a 17-person platform organization covering cloud platform, DevOps, SecOps, DBA/persistence, observability, and service desk/IT. Responsible for team structure, hiring, governance, platform strategy, and operating model design across multi-account AWS and hundreds of applications.
Key Decisions
- Built the platform organization from scratch rather than incrementally expanding an existing team.
- Established explicit ownership boundaries between platform and product teams.
- Prioritized CI/CD modernization, observability, and operational governance before expanding the team’s scope.
- Designed governance mechanisms that could scale as the number of squads grew.
Implementation
- Recruited and led a 17-person platform organization.
- Established platform governance across cloud, delivery, observability, security, databases, and peak-event readiness.
- Drove CI/CD modernization that achieved broad adoption and materially reduced deployment time.
- Implemented observability, WAF, disaster-recovery, and operational-governance improvements.
- Created leadership capacity across the five core platform disciplines.
Results
- Established a platform operating model that supported 21–24 squads and approximately 140 engineers.
- Achieved broad CI/CD adoption and materially reduced deployment time.
- Improved operational governance, observability, and incident-response readiness.
- Created clearer ownership and escalation paths across the platform estate.
What It Demonstrates
Platform transformation requires adoption, operating mechanisms, and leadership alignment—not only tools. Organizations with more than 100 engineers need explicit ownership, shared operating models, and governance that create leverage across product teams.
Relevant Review Variant
Platform Effectiveness Review
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