Senior Engineer Champions Cloud Migration Strategy at Scale

By Ugo Aliogo

The enterprise technology landscape underwent seismic shifts in recent years, with cloud computing emerging as the dominant infrastructure paradigm. Yet the transition from on-premises systems to cloud environments represents one of software engineering’s most complex challenges, requiring not just technological migration but fundamental rearchitecting of how applications are built, deployed, and maintained.

Emmanuel Cadet joined Riot Games in November 2021 as a Senior Software Engineer, bringing over twelve years of full-stack development experience to an organization serving millions of users globally. His arrival coincided with the gaming industry’s accelerated cloud adoption, driven by demands for scalability, reliability, and rapid feature deployment that traditional infrastructure struggled to meet.

At Riot Games, Cadet has focused on developing and maintaining APIs while implementing microservices architectures that leverage cloud-native capabilities. His work encompasses the full spectrum of modern software development—from designing new features and optimizing existing systems to implementing security controls and establishing continuous integration and deployment pipelines. This holistic approach reflects lessons learned throughout a career spanning financial services, automotive technology, and now interactive entertainment.

The challenges Cadet addresses at Riot Games are substantial. Gaming platforms must handle massive concurrent user loads with minimal latency, as even small performance degradations directly impact user experience. Security is paramount, with valuable user data and intellectual property requiring robust protection. And the pace of feature development and iteration must remain rapid despite these constraints.

His experience proves particularly valuable in this context. Previous roles involved implementing secure microservices at Ford Motors using Spring Boot and Google Cloud Platform, where he managed the migration from Pivotal Cloud Foundry to GCP—a complex undertaking requiring careful consideration of database choices, scaling strategies, API gateway configuration, and secrets management. This hands-on migration experience provided insight into the pitfalls and best practices of cloud transition that he now applies at Riot Games.

Cadet’s technical toolkit has evolved to match modern cloud development demands. He works extensively with Java across multiple versions, leveraging frameworks like Spring and specialized tools like Kafka for real-time data streaming. His proficiency with AWS services enables him to architect solutions that take full advantage of cloud capabilities—auto-scaling to handle variable load, managed services to reduce operational overhead, and global distribution to minimize latency for worldwide user bases.

The role also demands strong collaborative skills. Cadet participates in pair programming, conducts code reviews, and engages in technical retrospectives—practices that ensure knowledge sharing and maintain code quality across distributed development teams. His Google Cloud Certified Associate Cloud Engineer certification demonstrates commitment to maintaining expertise as cloud platforms rapidly evolve.

Beyond immediate technical execution, Cadet focuses on reducing technical debt and optimizing features—essential work often neglected in favor of new development but critical for long-term system maintainability. He implements non-functional requirements around security, performance, logging, and deployment that may not be user-visible but fundamentally determine whether systems remain reliable under real-world conditions.

His career trajectory illustrates the expanding scope of software engineering. Early roles at Sogebank and Capital Bank focused on core banking systems and client-server applications. Subsequent positions involved web services, mobile integration, and increasingly distributed architectures. At Altimetrik, working on Ford projects, he engaged with cutting-edge technologies like autonomous vehicle platforms and vehicle routing optimization. Each transition required not just learning new tools but adapting to different performance requirements, security constraints, and user expectations.

Now at Riot Games, Cadet works at the intersection of scale, performance, and user experience that characterizes modern internet applications. The gaming industry’s demands—millions of concurrent users, real-time interaction, and zero tolerance for downtime—require engineering practices that balance rapid iteration with operational excellence. His contribution to building this infrastructure positions him at the forefront of cloud-native development practices that will increasingly define software engineering across all industries.