Shota Iwami
Autonomous Driving / Platform Engineer
Vehicle Systems | Observability | Cloud Infrastructure
Summary
Autonomous driving and platform engineer with production experience across vehicle systems and cloud infrastructure. Currently building the vehicle platform at newmo (robotaxi), responsible for on-vehicle telemetry, sensor integration, and fleet-wide monitoring.
Previously built production observability (Datadog, OpenTelemetry) and CI/CD pipelines on GCP and AWS at scale. Background in aerospace engineering (M.Eng.) and UAV flight controller development. Speaker at Datadog DASH 2025, panelist at Datadog Live Tokyo 2024, and multiple DevOps/observability conferences.
Core Skills
- SRE / Reliability Engineering (monitoring, alerting, incident response)
- Observability: Datadog, OpenTelemetry
- Cloud Infrastructure: GCP (Cloud Run, AlloyDB), AWS (ECS, Aurora), Terraform
- CI/CD & Automation: GitHub Actions
- Languages: C++, Python, Go
- Linux Systems & Automotive-grade Compute Platforms (NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Orin)
- Vehicle Telemetry & Fleet Monitoring (sensor dashboards, real-time data pipelines)
- Sensor Integration: Camera, LiDAR, GNSS/INS, CAN bus
- Vehicle Control: MPC, PID
Work Experience
newmo, Inc. - Lead Robotics Engineer / Autonomous Driving Software Engineer
April 2025 - Present
Autonomous Driving team (robotaxi)
First member of the autonomous driving team, growing the team to 25 members. Responsible for on-vehicle systems, sensor integration, telemetry infrastructure, and vehicle control software.
Vehicle Control & Drive-by-Wire
- Prototyped longitudinal (MPC) and lateral (PID) controllers for early vehicle validation
- Applied MPC to longitudinal planning for fleet vehicles
- Built prototype drive-by-wire system for early vehicle validation, including CAN bus protocol analysis and custom hardware controllers
Sensor Integration & Perception
- Designed all initial sensor mounts via CAD, ordered fabrication, and installed on vehicles
- Integrated LiDAR point cloud processing and real-time streaming pipelines
- Integrated GNSS/INS positioning system for vehicle localization
Telemetry, Data Collection & Visualization
- Built vehicle telemetry and sensor monitoring dashboards for fleet operations
- Designed on-vehicle data collection pipelines for LiDAR, camera, and GNSS sensors
Applications & ML Infrastructure
- Integrated routing engine and built iOS companion apps for passenger dispatch and in-vehicle display
- Enabled GPU-accelerated ML inference on DRIVE AGX Orin with CUDA and ONNX Runtime
Technology Stack:
- Language: C++, Python
- Compute: NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Orin, CUDA, ONNX Runtime
- Sensing: Camera, LiDAR, GNSS/INS, CAN bus
- Control: MPC, PID
- Tools: CAD, Docker, GitHub Actions
newmo, Inc. - Platform Engineer (Taxi / Rideshare)
November 2024 - March 2025
Drove adoption of trunk-based development by introducing feature flags (OpenFeature/flagd) and streamlining CI/CD pipelines. Built observability foundations with OpenTelemetry across services.
Observability & Incident Response
- Drove OpenTelemetry adoption across services for distributed tracing and metrics
- Designed error triage workflow with automated runbook generation and team-targeted alert routing
- Added structured logging for API gateway layer
Technology Stack:
- Language: Go
- Infrastructure: GCP (Cloud Run, AlloyDB, Knative, Artifact Registry), Envoy
- Observability: Datadog, OpenTelemetry
- IaC / CI/CD: Terraform, GitHub Actions
CyberAgent, Inc. - Backend Engineer
April 2022 - October 2024
AI Business Division, Co-creation Retail Media Division
Development of a new app for a major drugstore (April 2023 - October 2024)
Built backend APIs, external service integrations, and observability infrastructure for a major drugstore app with millions of potential users. Promoted trunk-based development with feature flags to improve delivery speed.
Technology Stack:
- Language: Go
- Infrastructure: AWS (ECS on Fargate, Aurora Serverless v2, DynamoDB)
- CI/CD: GitHub Actions, PipeCD, Terraform
- Observability: Datadog
- Communication: gRPC (grpc-web/envoy)
CRM system construction/mobile app/website/data migration for a foreign apparel company (April 2022 - March 2023)
Built a new CRM system from scratch, integrating multiple brands and platforms. Responsible for member-related features, external service integrations, data migration, and load testing.
Technology Stack:
- Language: Go
- Infrastructure: GCP (Cloud Run, Cloud Spanner, Cloud Functions, Pub/Sub)
- CI/CD: GitHub Actions, PipeCD, Terraform
- Observability: Datadog
- Communication: gRPC/REST (grpc-gateway)
GREE, Inc. - Full Stack Engineer (Internship)
January 2021 - September 2021
Aumo Inc.
Development of "aumo," a media platform. Involved in basic implementation of the backend and performance tuning of the frontend.
Technology Stack:
- Language: Ruby (Ruby on Rails)
- Infrastructure: AWS
hama, Inc. (formerly Space Entertainment Laboratory) - Software and Hardware Engineer (Internship)
January 2019 - March 2022
Development of a flying boat-type drone with wings. Contributed to flight controller software development, manufactured the aircraft, and designed airframe components using CAD.
Technology Stack:
- Language: C++/Python
- Software: PX4 Autopilot (flight controller development) / Arduino
- Hardware: Pixhawk, IMU, GPS, barometer
- Tools: SOLIDWORKS
Education
Tokyo Metropolitan University Graduate School
2020 - 2022
Master of Engineering, Aerospace Engineering
Thesis: "Flight Experiment of Four-dimensional Navigation for Drones Assuming Unmanned Aircraft Traffic Management"
Tokyo Metropolitan University
April 2016 - March 2020
Bachelor of Engineering, Aerospace Engineering
Publications
Software Design 2025 May Issue — Feature article on OpenTelemetry
Gijutsu-Hyoron (Technical Magazine)
Conference Talks
Datadog DASH 2025 — New York, USA (June 2025)
Speaker (Datadog's flagship annual conference)
Topic: "Monorepo Error Management: Automated Runbooks and Team-Targeted Alert Distribution"
CloudNative Days SUMMER 2025 (May 2025)
Datadog Sponsor Session
Topic: "Building Observability Infrastructure from the Ground Up at an Early-Stage Startup"
Datadog Live Tokyo 2024 Reprise (December 2024)
Panelist (Datadog's official regional event)
Panel: "SREs Talk! Building Observability with Datadog — Challenges and Outlook from Product Companies"
CloudNative Days SUMMER 2024 (June 2024)
Topic: "Declarative Aggregation Management of Feature Flags Using OpenFeature and Code Generation"
Go Conference 2024 (June 2024)
Topic: "Building Go AST from Unified Diff Format Differences for Automatic Feature Flag Instrumentation"
DevOpsDays TOKYO 2024 (April 2024)
Topic: "Unified Management of Errors, Alerts, and Runbooks Using Code Generation to Reduce Operational Costs"
Go Conference mini 2023 Winter IN KYOTO (December 2023)
Topic: "Efficient Load Testing Strategies Using Go's Protoc Plugin"
Community Talks
Japan Datadog User Group Meetup #12 (August 2025)
Topic: "Monorepo Error Management: Automated Runbooks and Team-Targeted Alert Routing"
Observability Frontline from Software Design Meetup #3 (July 2025)
Topic: "Mastering OpenTelemetry Logs"
Visualizing and Optimizing Systems with Datadog (February 2025)
Topic: "Monorepo Error Triage: Team-Targeted Routing with Datadog"
Top 4 Load Testing Tools! User Insights into Effective Performance Testing Practices (September 2024)
Topic: "Building a Scalable and Reproducible Load Testing Platform with k6"
Learn from Real-World Use Cases! The Unknown World of Datadog (August 2024)
Topic: "Advanced techniques for leveraging Datadog's features"
OpenTelemetry Meetup #3 (June 2024)
Topic: "Feature Flags and OpenTelemetry"
Certifications
- Datadog Fundamentals (July 2023) - Datadog
- Professional Cloud Architect (April 2023) - Google Cloud