The InfoQ Podcast

Engineering Stable, Secure and Scalable Platforms: A Conversation with Matthew Liste

10 snips
Apr 20, 2026
Guest
Matthew Liste
Matthew Liste, who oversees American Express’s data center, resiliency and multi-cloud strategies with 30+ years in infrastructure engineering. He talks about building stable, secure, and scalable platform foundations. Conversations cover using customer journeys to find risk, managing resource tradeoffs, chaos testing for edge-of-failure scenarios, and how AI changes apprenticeship and observability.
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ANECDOTE

Childhood Mainframe Chess Sparked A Systems Career

  • Matthew Liste’s first spark came playing chess against a mainframe as a child in Norway, which convinced him computing felt like magic.
  • He then soldered electronics and built PCs, describing early hands-on tinkering as the root of his systems career.
ANECDOTE

Boss Cut My Cable To Teach Proper Craftsmanship

  • Matthew recalls a Schlumberger summer job where his boss cut apart a working cable to teach him to solder properly.
  • The lesson: visible functionality doesn’t equal craftsmanship; do it right to avoid future failure.
INSIGHT

The Three Nonnegotiable Requirements For Platforms

  • Platform systems must be stable, secure, and scalable as non-negotiable production requirements.
  • These three S's force conservative trade-offs: too little change becomes stale, too much invites risk in critical banking services.
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