In this episode of Semaphore Uncut, we talk with Sebastian Gierlinger, VP of Engineering at Storyblok, about what it really takes to scale a fully remote engineering organization—from early startup days to a 250-person company.
Disclaimer: This interview was recorded in 2025.
From Security to Engineering Leadership
Sebastian’s career didn’t start with a classic computer science path. He studied computer and media security, earning both bachelor’s and master’s degrees—an influence that still shapes how he approaches engineering leadership today.
After university, he founded his first startup (which didn’t work out), then spent several years in a large corporate environment building e-government software. He later joined Ghost, the open-source blogging platform, working on infrastructure for the hosted product.
Five years ago, he joined Storyblok—first as VP of Developer Experience, building DevRel and solution engineering teams, and later stepping into the VP of Engineering role. Today, he oversees product engineering, infrastructure, product management, and developer experience.
Why Storyblok Went Headless
Storyblok is a headless content management system. Instead of tightly coupling content and presentation, Storyblok hosts the backend and admin interface and exposes content through APIs. Teams are free to choose any frontend—web, mobile, or otherwise.
The payoff is long-term flexibility. Frontend technologies change quickly; content systems don’t. By decoupling the two, teams avoid locking themselves into decisions they’ll regret years later. The same principle applies to search, e-commerce, and other capabilities that are better treated as composable systems rather than built-ins.
The Engineering Stack: Simple by Design
Storyblok runs fully on AWS, but with intentional abstraction to avoid hard lock-in. Terraform is used for infrastructure, API services run in containers on managed Kubernetes, and a large relational database sits at the core.
The frontend is a Vue.js application that consumes the same APIs customers use.
There’s nothing flashy here—and that’s the point. The stack is designed to be understandable, maintainable, and scalable without unnecessary complexity.
Scaling from 10 to 250 People—Remotely
When Sebastian joined, Storyblok had around 10 people. Today, it has roughly 250 employees, with about 80 in engineering.
One inflection point stands out: crossing 100 people.
“That’s when you stop knowing everyone,” Sebastian says. “You get a Slack message from someone you don’t recognize—and then you find out they’re on your team.”
Storyblok is fully remote, with engineers spread across Europe, the US, and Latin America. That shapes everything—from working hours to how decisions are made.
To keep alignment strong, the company leans on informal coffee chats, intentional relationship-building, and annual in-person retreats. High-stakes conversations—vision, strategy, and major tradeoffs—are handled face to face whenever possible.
When Scrum No Longer Worked
Like many startups, Storyblok started with Scrum—largely because it was the default choice. As the organization grew, cracks appeared.
Specialists clustered around specific areas of the product, creating bottlenecks. Some teams were overloaded while others had spare capacity. Work slowed, not due to lack of people, but because it couldn’t move smoothly across boundaries.
To address this, Storyblok experimented with Shape Up, the methodology popularized by Basecamp. Longer cycles, clearer project shaping, and teams formed around projects—not components—helped the company finish more work and reduce half-done initiatives.
The key lesson wasn’t that Shape Up is universally better, but that process needs to evolve as organizations scale.
Balancing Specialization and Flexibility
Storyblok separates backend, frontend, and QA roles—partly driven by the Ruby ecosystem, where deep specialization is common.
Still, Sebastian is cautious about going too far.
“At our size, we need people who can work across the system,” he says. That’s especially true for maintenance and support work, where narrow ownership doesn’t scale. Engineers don’t need to be experts in everything, but they do need shared context.
AI: Useful, Powerful, and Easy to Over-Trust
Sebastian looks at AI from three angles.
For customers, AI is optional. Some want it, others don’t. Storyblok makes AI features available but never mandatory, and is working toward options that let customers control which AI providers are used.
For developers, GitHub Copilot is the baseline. Other tools are encouraged on an experimental basis, especially where they help with debugging and understanding failures.
From a leadership perspective, Sebastian is both excited and cautious. AI can accelerate work—but it can also flood systems with low-quality code if left unchecked. The future, he believes, will involve more review, judgment, and ownership over what AI produces.
Scaling Is a Systems Problem
Storyblok’s journey reinforces a familiar lesson for engineering leaders: scaling isn’t mainly about hiring or tools. It’s about systems.
What works at 10 people breaks at 100. Informal alignment gives way to intentional structure. Processes need to be revisited as teams, codebases, and delivery pipelines grow.
For remote-first teams, the challenge isn’t just shipping more code—it’s maintaining shared understanding of the system, the strategy, and the work itself.
Follow Sebastian Gierlinger & Storyblok
Website: https://www.storyblok.com
Docs: https://www.storyblok.com/docs
LinkedIn (Sebastian): https://www.linkedin.com/in/sgierlinger
X: https://x.com/sebgie
