At a fourteen-person company, every hire is a bet. Hiring an infra engineer is a particularly expensive bet — you're paying for someone whose work the product team will never see. We made that hire last year, briefly, and then I bought us out of it.
Stradiva is the reason I could. The data layer is one HCL file per pipeline. The deploy story is one git push. The observability story is the same screen everyone already opens to debug a request.
What this lets us do is uncomfortable for a founding team to admit: we can give every engineer their own end-to-end ownership. The senior backend person doesn't have to babysit a deploy. The junior fullstack person can ship to production on day three.
We're not saving on salary. We're saving on the meetings that exist because nobody owns the whole path.
— Mei-Lin Park, Founding Engineer, Orbital