Cloud Platform Engineering London: Building for the unexpected and Teams Culture

Hello and welcome to Cloud Platform Engineering London! This meetup brings together platform engineers, cloud architects, SREs, engineering managers, and practitioners working on the systems, culture, and tooling behind modern engineering organisations. A huge thank you to Experis for hosting and sponsoring this event. Speakers and sessions:Refactoring Team CultureBrittany Woods, Head of Systems Infrastructure, Man GroupImproving the culture and experience of DevOps teams is not about adding more tools or piling on new processes. It is about creating the conditions where people can thrive. When engineers feel empowered, supported, and trusted, they deliver not just code but lasting impact for the business. Too often, though, teams get bogged down by friction: unclear ownership, unnecessary bureaucracy, or a lack of shared purpose.In this session, Brittany will explore practical approaches and best practices for building healthier, more effective DevOps cultures. Drawing on real-world experience leading platform, governance, and engineering teams, she will share strategies for fostering autonomy without chaos, encouraging collaboration without micromanagement, and aligning technical teams with business outcomes.Attendees will leave with actionable ideas they can start applying immediately, from creating internal communities that inspire innovation, to building platforms teams actually want to use, to rethinking leadership habits that may be unintentionally holding people back. Brittany Woods is the Head of Systems Infrastructure at Man Group, based in London. With a career spanning technical and leadership roles across the financial and e-commerce sectors, she has been a passionate advocate for DevOps both within the organisations she has served and the broader tech community. Brittany has led initiatives to enhance developer experience, establish and scale platform engineering functions, and foster innovation, with a strong emphasis on improving organisational culture. Her thought leadership was recognised in the book 97 Things Every Cloud Engineer Should Know, where she contributed an article on breaking down silos in modern tech teams. Building for the Unexpected: Concurrency and Self-Healing in a Go-Based HLS OrchestratorStefan Cornea, Software Engineer, Signapse.aiVideo streaming is a constant battle against network entropy. In a live broadcasting environment, packets get delayed, networks jitter, and sources temporarily disconnect. If your infrastructure is not built to expect this chaos, the end user's video player crashes.In this session, Stefan will dive into the architecture of modern video delivery through a custom-built, low-latency HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) orchestrator. The talk will demystify the mechanics behind .m3u8 manifests and .ts payloads, and explore why Go's concurrency model, specifically goroutines and sync.RWMutex, is the right tool for handling simultaneous read and write locks across hundreds of streams.Attendees will learn how to architect a strict sliding window memory buffer and implement advanced self-healing contiguity logic, including how the orchestrator detects missing sequence numbers, ghosts out-of-order segments to protect the client, and repairs the stream once delayed data arrives. The session closes with a live chaos demo, using a custom Next.js dashboard to visualise backend ingestion, sequence ghosting, and stream recovery in real time. Stefan Cornea is a results-driven Full Stack Software Engineer at Signapse.ai, where he focuses on building scalable solutions and optimising complex developer workflows. With deep expertise across Golang, Node.js, and cloud platforms including AWS and GCP, he combines technical precision with a leadership-first mindset as a Google Developer Groups (GDG) Organiser. Committed to clean, maintainable code and community growth, Stefan actively drives innovation through mentorship and technical workshops. Agenda:18:00 Arrival, refreshments and networking18:30 / Welcome and introduction18:35 / Refactoring Team Culture, Brittany Woods19:00 / Break and networking19:20 / Building for the Unexpected, Stefan Cornea20:00 / Networking20:45 Close Venue:Experis, 4th Floor, Building 7, Devonshire Square, London EC2M 4YE About the community:Cloud Platform Engineering London is part of the Community Stack ecosystem, bringing together technical practitioners, leaders, partners, and organisations across cloud, platform engineering, data, AI, and open technology. We are always keen to hear from speakers, hosts, sponsors, and community partners. If you would like to speak, sponsor, or host a future event, please reach out to Ethan Sumner via LinkedIn. You can also find more here: Speaker GuideSponsorshipVenue Partner This event follows the Community Stack Code of Conduct and Privacy Policy, ensuring a respectful, inclusive, and welcoming environment for all attendees.