Profile
Results-focused senior engineering leader with a proven track record of delivering in fast-paced, challenging environments. Skilled in building, training, and mentoring teams to create highly engaged engineering organisations that deliver products clients love. Former developer and entrepreneur with multilingual proficiency in English, French, Spanish, Arabic, and German.
Experience
Berlin, Germany
- Responsible for creation and hiring of a new development team
- Successful on-time launch of Babbel Live Private Classes
- Product, project and stakeholder management as interim PM alongside engineering responsibilities
- Coordination with internal business partners to ensure product specifications meet business requirements
- Responsible for the design and development of the Kommon SaaS platform
- Designed MVP with the CEO based on initial customer discovery
- Optimised the platform based on user behaviour tracking to increase conversion and maximise revenue and user satisfaction
Beirut, Lebanon
Created an IT training programme for refugee youth in Shatila refugee camp in collaboration with a local NGO.
- Designed pilot programme to teach IT foundation skills and Office applications
- Taught pilot programme to 40+ students; scaled to 200+ students
- Hiring and training of local teachers; planned a web-development bootcamp for 40 students
Montreal, Canada
- Member of the Executive Team; responsible for overall technical direction
- Re-architecture and optimisation of legacy Python-based data processing infrastructure
- Implementation of best practices for code quality, process and system redundancy
- Hiring and scaling the development team; planning future growth of team and technology
- Delivery of product roadmap
Montreal, Canada
Canada's largest LGBTQ+ Hackathon, enabling 100+ volunteers to contribute to technical projects for Montreal non-profits.
- Technical feasibility study and project definition for 10+ non-profits
- Coordination of 13 project managers and over 100 participants
Montreal, Canada
Managed a 7-person team building the bookwitty.com website and API in Ruby on Rails, responsible for execution of the product roadmap.
- Defined product vision and clarified functional and technical requirements across all teams
- Implementation of agile software development process
- Coordination of Product, UX, SEO, mobile, design and editorial teams
- Hiring and mentoring of development, QA and SEO roles
Paris, France
Direct Publisher Platform
- Co-responsible for creation of a new engineering team for the mid-market publisher platform
- Migration of legacy bidding platform to OpenRTB 2.x; automation of publisher signup
Ad-X Mobile Analytics Platform
- Managed DB scaling challenges on an API platform handling >20k req/s
- Development of tracking platform (PHP, MySQL, Kafka/Storm)
- Front-end dashboard migration to ExtJS5; Windows Phone SDK development
- DevOps — server configuration with Chef
Paris, France
Technical leadership and coordination for the relaunch of maxi-mag.fr, rescuing a project that was initially badly scoped and behind schedule.
- Management of a 10-person offsite development team in Eastern Europe
- Implementation of agile best practices to improve communication, organisation and delivery
- Validation of functional specs; creation of technical specs; co-ordination with external partners
Paris, France
Founded and grew one of the leading Parisian restaurant guides. Responsible for technical architecture and development, team building, product portfolio, and marketing.
- Development of multilingual platform (EN, FR, ES, DE)
- Created business plan and monetisation strategy; premium functionality for restaurant owners
- Management of sales representatives and interns; negotiation with external partners
Paris, France
Coordinated a 20-person cross-functional team (engineering, web development, QA, UX) to deliver the co-branded Yahoo!/Eurosport site following a multi-year content partnership.
- Co-ordination of development and launch across 5 countries
- Accountable to senior management for execution; engineering specification definition
Paris, France
- Launch of Yahoo! Dating in the UK, France and Germany
- Porting of legacy platform to PHP/MySQL with full i18n/l10n
- Managing scalability of a multi-continent deployment; management of European engineering team
Paris, France
- Development of European CMS (Perl/MySQL): feed integration, template management, page generation, i18n/l10n
- Development and maintenance of several EU sites (Travel, Classifieds, Weather, Search, Mobile)
Earlier roles (1996 – 1999)
Vélizy, France
- Application development (C, Perl, SQL, CGI, JavaScript); Apache/Solaris/Linux administration; client liaison
Paris, France
- Linux TCP/IP network setup (SMB, firewall, proxy); student IT training
La Défense, Paris
- Online catalogue and payment system; Perl/C development; Apache/FreeBSD administration
Manchester, England
- Perl and C development; UNIX network management for an internet service provider