Portrait of Mehrdad Hedayati

Mehrdad Hedayati

Engineering Team Lead, AI & Platform Engineering

about

I lead the AI & Automation and Platform Engineering teams at Roadsurfer. That's six engineers. Most of my week is still code.

I've written software since high school, starting with Z80 assembly for RoboCup Junior soccer robots. I co-founded my first company in 2011. Since then I've worked with teams in Iran, the Netherlands, the US, the UAE, Sweden and Germany, mostly remote.

Frankfurt, Germany. English, German (B1), Persian.

now

October 2026

  • Writing the infrastructure roadmap for Platform Engineering.
  • Running the automation platform every Roadsurfer department builds on.
  • Mentoring on ADPList (opens in a new tab), for free.
  • Learning German.

agentic coding

I use Claude Code every day and keep looking for better ways to work with it. When something works, I share it with my team and other engineers at Roadsurfer.

  • I set up Roadsurfer's Claude Code plugin marketplace for engineering. More than ten engineers have contributed so far.
  • I created the AI fluency framework, and it's now part of our engineering career framework.

The best thing I've built for this is orchestrate (opens in a new tab), a planning skill based on Matt Pocock's wayfinder. It takes a project that's too big for one agent session and breaks it into small decisions. Once those are made, agents build it. A second agent reviews each change and a third re-runs the tests. Anything that needs a human, like a deploy, waits for me.

work

  • Automation platform, concept to production in under 3 monthsRoadsurfer · 2025 to now
    100+ tools
  • Sandbox-to-production rolloutRoadsurfer · CI/CD and automated tests
    days → minutes
  • Event pipeline from Segment to BrazeRoadsurfer · 2025 · sole engineer · no downtime in 6+ months
    2M+ events/day
  • Legacy CDP to Braze migration, under GDPRRoadsurfer · 2025 · 800K+ monthly users
    12B+ data points
  • Ad spend lost to broken data syncsInteraction Design Foundation · 2024
    $300K → <$70K/mo
  • Email deliverability after a notification rebuildInteraction Design Foundation · 2021 to 2023
    71% → 96%
  • Engineering team as founding engineer and interim CTOPodro · 2019 to 2020
    5 → 30+

how i lead

  • Every decision is a written document, and a ledger lists them all.
  • Engineers own their projects end to end. I set the roadmap and review.
  • Big work gets six-week cycles. Support runs as Kanban.
  • Any review I give twice becomes an automated check.

experience

  • Team Lead, Platform EngineeringRoadsurfer
    2026 –
  • Team Lead, AI & AutomationRoadsurfer
    2025 –
  • Senior Full-Stack Engineer, MarTechRoadsurfer
    2025
  • Senior Software EngineerInteraction Design Foundation, rejoined
    2023 – 2025
  • Full-Stack DeveloperParsly
    2023
  • Senior Software DeveloperInteraction Design Foundation
    2021 – 2023
  • Technical Lead & Founding EngineerPodro
    2019 – 2020
  • Lead Software DeveloperRDSysCo
    2016 – 2019
  • Software Developer, contractPlanstr
    2016
  • Lead Software DevelopernaisA Global
    2015 – 2016
  • Co-Founder and Full-Stack PHP DeveloperI2N
    2011 – 2015

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