Product engineer · Hands-on CTO · Founding engineer
I show up before the specs: I work out how the business actually runs, decide what is worth building, then build it, deploy it and answer when it breaks. 15 years of engineering, 5 of them in early-stage.
Freelance, fractional CTO or founding engineer.
I built at
About
I start from the business model and the real process: who decides what, where information gets lost, what was never written down. From there I work down to the product, the architecture, the data model and the code, and I stay on the system until it runs in production.
The thread has been the same for fifteen years: business, product, systems, data, automation, and now agents. Today: the data pipeline, the warehouse and the APIs feeding Mycophyto's internal applications. Before that: senior engineer in San Francisco at Arise Travel, co-founder and CTO of Scircula in Amsterdam, backend at Knap, Meta IT and Izargolf. That path happened in English, remotely, with teams in the United States, the Netherlands and South Africa.
To understand a business I look at the work itself: I need direct access to the people doing it and the people deciding, not a specification document. That is where the trade-offs come from.
Expertise
01
I map the real process, then replace it with an ERP the teams actually use because it follows the way they work, history migrated. Mapping the business comes before installing software.
02
REST APIs, webhooks, connectors: the ERP, billing, data and business tools stop answering each other through re-keying. Versioned, documented interfaces an internal team or a partner can consume.
03
Modeling, pipelines, quality, warehouse: a relational database as the source of truth, which the teams query themselves without going through a developer.
04
Data entry, sorting, follow-ups, reconciliations: I automate them, with the business rules written down instead of stored in someone's head.
05
Agents wired into your data and your tools, with explicit business rules and human validation where a decision is taken. I run them on my own systems before offering them.
Projects
01
Personal product · in development
Designed and built alone
Digital twin of a farm: plots, technical itineraries, production decisions, traceability. The work is the data chain: Postgres as the source of truth, n8n orchestrating, an agent normalizing and enriching incoming data with its provenance and a confidence level, and human validation before publication.
02
Arise Travel · prototype
Senior engineer, two implementations
Hotel bookings came in by phone, one human per call. Prototype of an automated switchboard, from the first sentence to the confirmed booking, with no operator. Two implementations explored: open-source components, then an API. Orchestration carried the risk: latency per turn, error recovery, real-time dashboard, containerized deployment.
03
Arise Travel · shut down with the startup
Design and implementation
Bookings went through intermediaries, and every layer added its own price errors. Private Hyperledger Fabric network: smart contracts for the booking logic and a distributed ledger shared across the participating organizations, with no intermediary re-translating the rates.
04
Clients · in production
Custom modules, connectors, data migration
SMEs and a farm team on spreadsheets or on software that did not match how they worked. Migration to an ERP shaped around their process: custom modules, connectors to existing tools, history migrated. Success comes down to the data migration and whether the team adopts it.
05
My own systems · daily use
Built and operated by me
Hermes runs on my systems rather than in a demo: normalizing incoming data, watching sources, preparing deployments, reviewing code. Every workflow follows the same chain: tools, data, explicit business rules, human validation where a decision is at stake, then action. The same mechanics plug into a company's processes.
06
Startup · 2020-2022
Co-founder & CTO
Online garment fit: matching a garment's measurements to the customer's to cut returns. Two years building the product, the team and the go-to-market with a South African co-founder. The bet ran into unreliable measurements and fashion brands that were hard to sell; the company stopped in 2022.
Experience
2024 — Present
Data Engineer & Full-Stack Developer
Grasse, France
Data pipeline, warehouse and APIs feeding the internal applications: the agronomy teams' questions become tools they use every day. Integrated with the ERP.
2022 — 2024
Senior Full-Stack Engineer
San Francisco, USA
AI switchboard prototype and a private Hyperledger Fabric network for hotel bookings, two implementations of the switchboard. Real-time dashboard, container orchestration.
2020 — 2022
Co-founder & CTO
Amsterdam, Netherlands
Product roadmap, architecture, hiring and code, through to the end of the adventure.
2018 — 2020
Senior Backend Engineer
Nice, France
Backend for a connected shopping cart: REST API, middlewares, embedded packaging, CI/CD and server operations.
2016 — 2017
Backend Developer
Biarritz, France
ERP integration at SMEs: custom modules, connectors, RESTful APIs. This is where operations digitalization started for me.
2012 — 2015
Backend & Mobile Developer
Biarritz, France
Web and mobile apps for golfers, from business logic to REST APIs and iOS and Android apps; coordinated the electronics contractors.
Tools
Working together
01
A problem to turn into a system: scoping, architecture, development, production. Written scope, and deliverables that run.
02
A product and a team, no technical leadership yet. Architecture, technical roadmap, hiring, and I code with the team.
03
Early-stage: everything is to build and time is short. From the first database schema to the first users, through the product trade-offs.
Problems I take on
Contact
Describe the situation in a few lines: what is stuck, what is still done by hand, what you cannot decide. I reply with how I read the problem and the first thing I would build.
I take few engagements at a time. Freelance, fractional CTO or founding engineer, on problems worth the technical effort. antoine@andrieu.me
