FFC NL 2025 TALKS

FFC UK 2025

What if you built less platform and got more done?

Platform engineering doesn’t have to mean building heavy abstractions or chasing internal NPS scores. In fast-moving domains like online car retail and restaurant tech, I’ve led architecture modernisation efforts through light-touch platforms that enable fast flow - not just enforce it. This meant defining sensible defaults, aligning teams around a focused golden path (serverless, event-driven, TypeScript), and using platform thinking to guide - not dictate - technical decisions. This talk shares how we modernised legacy systems while supporting real business outcomes - from enabling the sale of thousands of cars at scale, to powering ordering platforms for thousands of independent restaurants. You’ll hear how we handled standardisation without rigidity, used golden paths to accelerate rather than constrain, and evolved internal platforms that stayed out of the way when needed. Expect practical stories of what we paved, what we left open, and how platform teams can unlock speed without centralising control.

MEET THE SPEAKERS

Toli Apostolidis

Flipdish, Lead Architect

Toli is Head of Engineering Practice at cinch, arguably one of the most successful startups in UK startup history. Having been at cinch since the early days of their startup and scale up journey, Toli has helped establish DevOps, observability, and event-driven socio-technical practices across teams as they built on an entirely serverless platform on AWS. At cinch, Toli really "saw" Mr Conway and Observability Practices in action.

Toli draws from his experience as a Software Engineer across many software paradigms, stacks, and industries for over a decade. Viewing software engineering as a socio-technical practice has been influenced by his academic background in Mathematics and playing basketball semi-professionally