About Alban
As a senior software engineer, I can strengthen your workforce or bring extra (soft or hard) skills your team may need.
I have been working as a software engineer for 15 years, including two French unicorns.
Over those experiences, I developed my ability to dive into large existing code bases, to design local evolutions or improvements as well as new services integrated into a distributed system. I have a strong focus on the purpose a change serves and I value simplicity.
I am also fond of observability, especially for automating reliability and user satisfaction measurements.
Hiring tech profiles is also a topic I focused on. I designed interviews to specifically assess the expected skills for a given position, reducing the false-positive and (hopefully) false-negative outcomes.
My usual environment:
- Java / SpringBoot
- RDBMs (MariaDB, PostgreSQL)
- Kubernetes
- Agile (Scrum, Kanban)
I have occasionally worked with others stacks (dotNetCore, Python...) and am ready to dive into any stack.
If you need a software engineer, I'll be glad to chat!
If you don't, would you share with me two people that may need one I could talk to? :)
French
Native or bilingual
English
Fluent
Can work on-site
Poitiers (up to 50km), Paris (up to 20km), Tours (up to 50km), Bordeaux (up to 15km), Niort (up to 50km)
Experience
- MiraklSenior Software Engineer (freelance)E-COMMERCENovember 2025 - Today (7 months)Paris, FranceRelease a middleware between Shopify and the Mirakl platform, allowing Shopify shop owners to open their shop to third-party sellers.I more specifically designed and implemented internationalization support.I led the implementation of SLO, from design to change management.Stack: Java/SpringBoot, PostgreSQL, Shopify APIs, Mirakl Platform, Datadog
- BlaBlaCarSoftware engineerSOFTWARE PUBLISHINGSeptember 2019 - October 2024 (5 years and 1 month)Paris, France
Search Squad
Search Squad is a fullstack team responsible for BlaBlaCar's search user experience. The backend aggregates search results from each source and drives the frontend behaviour through APIs.- Coordinated from discovery to rollout product projects, including 9-months programs involving 4 teams
- Focused on improving the team's services reliability: improve processes and observability for running services, improve the design process for new ones
- Revamped the architecture to adapt it to the company's scale and path to multimodality; coordinated the transition to that architecture #NoRewrite
- Pioneered in the SLO implementation: worked side-to-side with the SRE team to implement the first technical SLOs and then Feature SLOs to improve our users' experience modelling accuracy; contributed to onboard other teams in the process
- Initiated Open Spaces ("Forum ouvert") for the backend team to create connections between team members and boost cooperation
- (and of course!) Contributed to the day-to-day delivery of the team
Monetize team
The Monetize team is a backend-only team responsible for defining the right monetization strategy for the passenger and orchestrating the purchase flow.- Contributed to releasing independent monetization services outside of a historical monolith, promoting architecture and code design better practices within the team
- Impulsed an SRE approach, with the main focus on reducing noise and alert fatigue during on-call shifts
- Led migration from Rocket/Fleet on-premise to Kubernetes/GCP
- Mentored a younger team member
Hiring
I led the definition of the new backend hiring exercise (live coding), with 6 other contributing engineers. We focused on the exercise's fairness and designed it to maximize equality of chances. The interview is designed to feel like a day-to-day job at BlaBlaCar and heavily promotes teamwork, which helps assessing soft skills. - CriteoSoftware EngineerSOFTWARE PUBLISHINGJanuary 2016 - March 2019 (3 years and 2 months)Paris, FranceCriteo is a leader in advertising re-targeting.
Observability team
This team is a support team in charge of observability tools (logging, metrics, distributed tracing).As the only developer in the team, I:- Pushed to design user-oriented APIs for the team's libraries
- Contributed to observability components (including open-source, like BigGraphite for instance)
- Promoted development best practices (designing, coding, testing and reviewing)
- Organized Scala workshops to ramp-up my teammates on this language
Scalability team
This team is the interface between SRE teams and feature teams, focused on service discovery and metrics.As an individual contributor, I:- Lead migration from an in-house metric aggregation tool to Prometheus (including communication and synchronization with other teams)
- Contributed to the definition and release of a way to uniquely identify an application from a code point of view
- Worked as support for JVM-related issues
Criteo Dynamic E-mail
Aside from Criteo's main banner business, Criteo Dynamic E-mail was an alternative way to reach customers by sending targeted e-mails. The product was shortly discontinued.As an individual contributor, I:- Contributed to deliverability-oriented tools (ability to deliver an a-mail into inbox and not into spam box)
- Revamped an e-mail templating tool
Transversal
In all those teams, I bootstrapped team retrospectives.
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Education
- EngineerÉcole Supérieure d'Électricité (Supélec)2009Electrical engineering, computer science, electronics, control theory. Gif-sur-Yvette campus. Specialisation in Rennes (35, France) in Secured Information Systems
- EngineerArts et Métiers ParisTech (ENSAM)2009Mechanics, fluid mechanics, manufacturing, computer science, applied mathematics