He holds a master’s degree in Computer Science. He worked at Google as a Software Engineer on Google Docs, contributing to improving its robustness. During his tenure as a Principal Software Architect at Microsoft Azure Engineering Systems, he focused on mitigating critical risks within the Azure platform. This involved projects to build a hybrid cloud solution for Azure and an end-to-end framework for deploying to private clouds while adhering to security and compliance requirements. This framework played a critical role in deploying various private clouds for Microsoft, including Azure Top Secret Government Cloud, Azure Government Secret Cloud, Azure Government Cloud, Azure China, and Azure Germany.

Currently, at the self-driving car company Cruise, he works as a Staff Software Engineer on the mapping team, helping to make self-driving cars a reality in a safe manner. He contributed to speeding up the map generation process, enabling more testing, and contributing to overall safety. He also led initiatives at Cruise aimed at enhancing mapping scalability, refining algorithms, reducing map storage size, optimizing map loading in AV memory, and implementing shared memory across processes, resulting in memory optimization. This means that the cars can now hold bigger maps and launch in bigger cities. Joel is also an advisor to several industry-leading forums.

With his wealth of experience and dedication to innovation, he continues to make significant contributions to the advancement of technology, ensuring safer and more efficient solutions for the future.