I build software that goes out and does something in the world — usually involving hardware that can be unplugged, data that can't leave the building, or a model that shipped last Tuesday and isn't in anyone's catalog yet. 🕺
Currently Lead Founding Product Engineer at Arlequin AI in Paris, where I work on an airgapped, on-premises LLM platform. "Airgapped" meaning no internet, no remote access, and no SSHing in from the couch at 11pm to fix it. You learn to test properly.
Before that: robotics at iRobot, a healthcare scaleup in New York, my own venture, and a year advising founders across Dubai and Iraq.
myst — An automatic watering system for houseplants. I built the hardware prototype and wrote the MicroPython firmware. It ran in my apartment and in a few friends' homes, which is the highest-stakes deployment environment there is: if it fails, something dies and a friend is passive-aggressive about it. Waters every 4 days, 3 times a day, 2 minutes a go — numbers arrived at empirically, by killing plants. A 2019 prototype and honestly a bit rough; the README says which bits never got finished.
vacay — A leave-management app: time-off policies, accrual rules, public holidays by country, and a team calendar for booking days off. Django/DRF backend and a React frontend on an admin template, built through 2023 with a collaborator. My end was the HR data pipeline — pulling company workforce sheets out of Google Sheets, validating them, and running them past a model — plus a pile of frontend work on the calendar and dashboard. The plan was to take it into French leave law — congés payés acquisition periods, RTT, carry-over, the whole Code du travail rabbit hole — which is a great deal more interesting than the flat PTO counter most tools ship. We never got there, so what's public is the generic version.
Some of my favourite work lives behind a private repo — either built for clients as freelance work, or shared with collaborators who'd rather I didn't publish their source. Happy to walk through any of these; the code stays put, but the war stories travel.
is it postable — Backend for a mobile app that gives you friendly feedback on what to post on Instagram, integrating OpenAI back in early 2024 when that was still a slightly adventurous thing to do. A friend designed the user flow; I built the Flutterflow frontend and the Python/Django backend. Also my first properly vibe-coded app — VSCode with ChatGPT riding shotgun, well before that was a normal way to work.
Nilo — A smartwatch to help parents care for children with ADHD. Contracted to take it from idea to first working prototype: a watch app in JavaScript on an open wearable platform, a Python/FastAPI service behind it, and a TypeScript React PWA for the parent-facing side. All of it was built with Claude — and I mean all of it. The design, the watch app, the service, the PWA. Three runtimes, one wrist, and a collaborator with no opinions about whose turn it was to write the tests. 🕺
Python (services, orchestration, concurrency, CLIs) · TypeScript/React · C/C++ and embedded · LLM inference serving, RAG, agentic workflows, evals · Spark/Databricks · AWS
🇫🇷 French (native) · 🇬🇧 English · 🇩🇪 German (conversational) · 🇱🇧 Arabic (at home, badly conjugated)
📍 Paris · LinkedIn