American Express Leader Shares 12 Principles for Building Resilient Platforms

Matthew Liste, the infrastructure leader at American Express, has shared 12 guiding principles for building resilient enterprise-scale platforms. Drawing from his extensive experience at firms like JPMorganChase and Goldman Sachs, Liste’s principles aim to help engineering teams overcome platform development challenges. He defines a platform as a foundation of integrated technologies, citing cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and GCP as prime examples.

The principles emphasize various aspects of platform development, including delivering an intuitive experience that hides complexity, building common and interchangeable components, and ensuring the '3 S's', stability, security, and scalability, through formal Service Level Objectives (SLOs). Liste also stresses the importance of continuous upgrades, avoiding unnecessary heavy lifting, and making opinionated decisions that benefit the majority.

Other key principles include failing quickly and often to learn from iterations, sharing responsibility with clear boundaries, abstracting details without obfuscation, and leveraging open-source technologies. Liste highlights that successful platforms are often taken for granted until they fail and notes that building a strong culture is essential for consistent high-quality outcomes.

While Liste acknowledges that the principles are not exhaustive, he believes they reflect valuable insights from his years of experience in building platforms at scale. His framework offers a roadmap for engineering teams looking to create resilient, mission-critical software.