About
I build engineering organisations and help struggling ones recover.
I am an engineering and technology executive. Over fifteen years in retail and finance, I have built teams from scratch, turned fragmented organisations around, and reduced cost and complexity without slowing delivery.
I have shipped applied AI in production since 2016, not 2023: computer vision (including OCR), chatbots like the YODA assistant well before ChatGPT, and now production RAG and LLMs. I care about the version that survives contact with real users and a budget.
I am comfortable discussing strategy and budgets with an executive committee, and I still work directly with Terraform, delivery pipelines and code. I can set the direction, then stay close enough to make sure it works in production.
I got my first computer at six and took every hand-me-down machine apart to understand how it worked. I still build because I enjoy it: this site and its publishing pipeline, tools I use every day, and open-source contributions to software my teams use in production. Several people I have managed have said they would work with me again. I value that more than any title.
In brief
- Based
- Near Toulouse, France
- Works
- Remotely across the EU and worldwide
- Languages
- French and English (fluent); notions of German, Spanish and Italian
- Since
- Applied AI in production since 2016
The short version
- 01
Sopra Banking: critical card-payment systems and PCI-DSS compliance, on a platform serving millions of cards.
- 02
Société Générale: Lead Developer, then Engineering Manager over an innovation lab and a developer-experience group. The YODA assistant and computer vision (including OCR) before ChatGPT, Pepper robots, the PSD2 API platform, and an investor-relations app that won two 2016 awards.
- 03
Société Générale Equipment Finance (SGEF): Chief Digital Officer, and managing director of a new Berlin subsidiary. A Digital Factory built from zero in under six months, and an AI risk engine that cut credit analysis from about two weeks to a day.
- 04
Groupe Chantelle: Director of digital and e-commerce engineering under the CDO. Six platforms reduced to two, annual costs cut from €4M to €3M, a 99.99% SLO, and generative AI in production.
Education
- ENSICAEN: engineering degree, computer science
- IAE Caen: completed MAE coursework alongside the ENSICAEN engineering apprenticeship. The programmes' schedules conflicted, so I could not sit most MAE exams and did not receive the degree
- IUT Caen: DUT GEII, electrical and industrial computing