Trustpilot’s Journey From Monolith To Event-Driven With Engineering VP Angela Timofte Smooth Scaling: System Design For High Traffic podcast

Trustpilot’s Journey From Monolith to Event-Driven with Engineering VP Angela Timofte

Smooth Scaling: System Design for High Traffic

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In this episode, Angela Timofte, former VP of Global Engineering at Trustpilot, shares the decade-long journey of evolving Trustpilot’s architecture from a monolith to an event-driven, serverless-first platform. She reflects on the technical and organizational shifts that made it possible—from early trade-offs and nano-services to guardrails, templating, and chaos engineering. Angela also discusses the role of AI in engineering productivity, why staying small matters, and what scalability really means across tech, teams, and leadership. A thoughtful, candid look at modernizing systems for long-term resilience.

Episode page

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(00:00) - Welcome & Episode Introduction

(01:14) - What a Monolith Really Is

(03:15) - Why Starting With a Monolith Made Sense

(04:52) - The Breaking Point: When Scale Hit Hard

(07:21) - Baby Monoliths & Early Decomposition

(11:13) - The Shift to Serverless First

(13:21) - Guardrails, VM Alerts & Tech Stack Choices

(21:17) - Microservices to Nano Services: The Trade-offs

(25:47) - Traffic Peaks, Auto-Scaling & Stress Testing

(33:05) - Staying Small by Design: Team Structure & Conway’s Law

(36:28) - The Impact of AI in Engineering & New Beginnings

(43:28) - Rapid-Fire: Books, Advice & Defining Scalability

(46:19) - Wrap-up

Angela Timofte is a technology leader known for transforming organizations for scale and impact. As former VP of Global Engineering & Applied AI at Trustpilot, she led both the engineering and data science functions, driving the company’s shift from monolithic systems to scalable, event-driven, cloud-native architecture and drove a major transformation going from maintenance to value creation across the engineering organization. An AWS Serverless Hero and international speaker, she’s recognized for her work on scalability, data infrastructure, and high-performance engineering culture. Today, Angela advises companies through her consultancy, Atim Advisory, and is building a new tech venture.

This podcast is hosted by José Quaresma, researched by Joseph Thwaites and produced by Perseu Mandillo.

16 episodes