About Aliou
I help teams figure out where AI makes sense in their product, then I help them build it.
I've been doing this for 12+ years, mostly at startups. I was CTO at Combo (Snapshift), where I grew the engineering team from one part-time developer to nine engineers, a designer, and a product manager. Before that I was on the founding team at Topo.io, which went through YC W24. Now I run General Dexterity, where I do applied AI consulting.
Some recent work:
- A sales team was juggling five different tools to prospect restaurants. I built them an AI agent in five weeks. Tool selection accuracy went from 65% to 92%.
- A venture firm needed to understand the tech behind an AI SaaS before acquiring it. I did a full technical due diligence in three days. Found 30-50% potential savings on their AI scaling costs.
- A construction company kept losing money on coordination errors between worksites. I helped them ship a site visibility app that cut material tracking errors by about 70%. It was running on 10+ sites within six months.
- At Combo, we had 400,000 restaurant records across two databases with no shared identifier. I built a matching system that cut the computation by 99.999%. Still runs in production.
Most of my work sits at the overlap between product thinking and writing code. I'm at my best when the question is "what should we build and how" rather than "build this spec."
I write about AI tooling and coding agents at aliou.me.
Bilingual French/English. Based in Paris.
French
Native or bilingual
English
Native or bilingual
Can work on-site
Paris (up to 50km)
Experience
- ComboApplied AI ConsultantOctober 2025 - December 2025 (2 months)Paris, FranceBuilt an AI-assisted matching system for Combo to reconcile 400,000 restaurant records across two databases with no shared identifier.The new approach cut the required computation by 99.999% and still runs in production.
- Lindy PARISAI EngineerE-COMMERCEMay 2025 - June 2025 (1 month)Paris, FranceBuilt AI product functionality for Lindy.ai as an external engineer. Worked on applied AI features, product integration, and the engineering needed to turn LLM capabilities into something reliable for end users.Focused on shipping working product fast, not demos.
- MyCocoApplied AI ConsultantJanuary 2025 - January 2025Ran a technical due diligence on an AI SaaS in three days ahead of an acquisition. Reviewed the product, codebase, and AI cost structure to surface technical risk and scaling constraints.Found 30-50% in potential AI cost savings and gave the client a clearer view of what they were actually buying.
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Education
- Master of ScienceEPITECH - European Institute of Technology2015Master of Science (MS), Computer Science
- Bachelor of Science in Computer ScienceIUT de Dijon2012Bachelor's Degree, Computer Science