Alper's story starts in freelance game development and lands at a Berlin food-tech startup. He breaks down what platform engineering actually means at startup scale — reducing cognitive load on product teams, optimising cloud spend, and building systems that don't become liability as the company grows. He's honest about balancing leadership with parenthood too.
What we covered
- platform engineering
- cost optimisation
- developer experience
What I took away
- Platform engineering at startup scale means removing toil, not building a full IDP
- Cost optimisation is an ongoing discipline, not a one-time audit
- Developer experience is measurable — slow feedback loops and manual steps are symptoms
- The game dev mindset (iterate fast, ship small) transfers well to infra work