Shota Iwami

Shota Iwami

Autonomous Driving / Platform Engineer

Vehicle Systems | Observability | Cloud Infrastructure

shota.iwami@outlook.jp
Tokyo, Japan
linkedin.com/in/shota-iwami
github.com/BIwashi
speakerdeck.com/biwashi

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 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"

  • 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