Joel Freeman.
Hi, I'm Joel.
I'm a senior engineer at Starboard, where I lead platform and infrastructure. Before that I built weather data pipelines at MetService, modernised AWS accounts for more than a dozen customers at AC3, and started out on a support desk in 2019.
More about meCloud
I have seven years of experience designing, building and operating infrastructure across GCP, AWS and Azure. My work spans cloud foundations, secure access and cost optimisation, with a focus on making cloud environments easier for teams to manage.
- GCP
- AWS
- Azure
- Landing zones
- IAM
Experience
7 years · GCP · AWS · Azure- StarboardSenior Engineer, Platform & Infrastructure Lead
As the first dedicated infrastructure engineer, I designed and built Starboard’s internal Kubernetes platform for self-service application delivery, led the migration of production services onto it, and grew the function into a four-person team that I now lead.
2025 - now - MetServiceDevOps Platform Engineer
I helped build a real-time weather data platform on Azure using Databricks, Spark and Delta Lake, with deployment pipelines, Terraform modules, APIs and tooling to validate it against the legacy system. I later built a multi-account AWS delivery pipeline and an aviation weather data pipeline.
2023 - 2025 - AC3DevOps Engineer
Worked as a consultant across multiple projects. I modernised AWS environments using CDK, Terraform and CloudFormation, built AWS Config compliance tooling, upgraded Kubernetes clusters, and hardened VM images to CIS benchmarks using Azure Image Builder. I also reduced a customer’s hosting costs by 30% and improved performance by 25%.
2022 - 2023
What I do outside
Training for my second marathon. I also produce and DJ, with over 300,000 streams and plays on BBC Radio 1 and George FM.
Projects.
A few things I've designed and shipped, from infrastructure to apps.
One place for every agent session I have running across Claude Code and Codex, and every promise I made in Slack or a meeting.
- Electron
- TypeScript
- SQLite
- Claude Code
- Codex
whatA local daemon keeps everything in one SQLite archive on my machine and works out where each session is at.
A commercial product for music festivals that I co-founded. Atlas brings a festival's ticket sales, its app and what happens on site into one place. I'm the sole engineer, so I built the platform and the mobile app and run both in production.
- Next.js
- Prisma
- Postgres
- Expo
- React Native
- Vercel Workflows
AtlasAtlas keeps one record per event, artist and attendee, so each person is known across every event and the app: spend, returning, home city and music taste.
Atlas APIOne Next.js app on Vercel serves the web console and the REST API, keeps staff and attendee sign-in apart, and checks every caller before it reads any data.
At Starboard, I built the internal Kubernetes platform that every service runs on today and migrated all services onto it. It centres on self-service: a single-file service contract brings together alerting, routing, networking, deployment, configuration and delivery pipelines, so engineers can ship without managing each layer separately.
- GKE
- Argo CD
- Kargo
- Kyverno
- OPA
- Helm
- Envoy Gateway
- Terraform
- GCP PAM
Service contractAbout ten lines per service drive its deployment, secrets, network policy, gateway routes and alerts, with no platform ticket.
- Service contract drives
- Deployment
- Secrets from Secret Manager
- Network policy
- Gateway routes
- Alerts
Writing
Engineering articles on platform design, infrastructure delivery and the ways I test changes.
Defining your platform: capabilities, components and contracts
How I would describe a platform through the outcomes it promises, the components that provide them, and the checks that show whether a change still works.