Romain GÉRARD

Hands-on Head of Engineering - 10 people, Qovery, remote

Building a Dev(Ops) automation platform that lets engineering teams deploy and manage their applications, databases and environments on Kubernetes in their own cloud account (AWS, GCP, Scaleway), without having to build or run that infrastructure themselves.

Technical leadership

• Following the CTO's departure, I stepped up to take on his responsibilities alongside the Head of Product. My role evolved into a hybrid position at the intersection of Principal Engineering and Engineering Leadership. I operate across the entire engineering value chain, from participating in pre-sales discussions with clients and shaping technical solutions to guiding architectural decisions, unblocking engineers, coordinating delivery, and ensuring teams deliver on time. Rather than focusing exclusively on people management, I remain deeply involved in technical execution and business-facing activities, helping bridge the gap between business needs, product strategy, and engineering delivery.

• Define and carry the engineering strategic roadmap, ai adoption, and an agentic software factory inside teams

• Aligning the technical roadmap between sales, customer support, product and compliance stakeholders

Cross-functional alignment

• Work closely with Product, Sales, Customer Success, Marketing, and the CEO to ensure business objectives are met
• Involved with customers to POC product initiatives
• Managing conflicts between divergent incentives

Engineering organization

• Re-organizing teams to avoid knowledge silos and reduce management work due to product priority changes
• Increased written communication to give autonomy without communication overhead
• Normalized teams' delivery process, cadence and output format to align delivery with company objectives
• Put in place a FinOps practice & manage budgets for tools, services, and infrastructure Costory

Culture

• Created an engineering café for all to share and learn beyond the organizational structure
• Ensuring operational excellence by formalizing post-mortems and making them systematic
• Contributed to setting expectations for the product engineer role

Staying operational - Hands-on

• Implemented and released AI MCP server of Qovery MCP; AI
• Participated in frontend development Typescript, React
• Staying operational and compensating for an organizational void when needed
  • Help deliver features to close deals and POC with clients AI sandbox; nftables; mitmproxy
  • Ramp up on new tech - Kubernetes Gateway, AI
  • Supporting teams by sharing maintenance work and tackling tech debt

Founding Lead Backend Engineer, Qovery, remote

Development:

• Joined as founding backend engineer. Rewrote and design a multi-service backend from scratch to meet the reliability, security, and scalability required to run a business SaaS Kotlin, Spring Boot, PostgreSQL, Redis, Go, REST API, JWT, Prometheus

• Build engine supporting a customer-facing developer platform (over 200 Kubernetes clusters) Rust, Helm, Terraform, Kubernetes, AWS, GCP, Scaleway

• Created agents/operators running on clients' Kubernetes clusters to extract real-time information (logs, metrics, status, ...) Rust, Tokio, gRPC, Kubernetes

• Created network gateways to command and control clients' cluster agents to provide users with on-demand real-time interactions Rust, Tokio, WebSocket, gRPC, Remote shell, ECDSA

• Participated in frontend development Typescript, React

• Design and implementation of new product features Kotlin, Rust, Terraform, Helm, AWS, GCP, Scaleway

• Contributed to open-source projects by fixing upstream issues

  • https://github.com/hyperium/h2/issues/633
  • https://github.com/rust-lang/futures-rs/pull/2686
  • https://github.com/kube-rs/kube/pull/1112
  • https://github.com/nats-io/nats.rs/pull/177
  • https://gitlab.com/glts/viaspf/-/merge_requests/3

Infrastructure:

• Allowed the team to deploy multiple times a day by putting in place CI/CD with automatic testing GitLab CI, Kubernetes, Docker

• Work on the Qovery engine to deploy and manage the infrastructure of our clients(> 200 kubernetes infrastructure) Rust, Go, Helm, Terraform, Kubernetes, AWS, GCP, Scaleway

• Set up observability to ensure correct behavior of the platform and fast incident resolution Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Alloy, Kubernetes

• Put in place security (authentication + encryption) on our message bus to guarantee client data safety Auth0, JWT, NATS, TLS, Let's Encrypt, Kubernetes

• Put in place CI to support ARM64 and AMD64 builds of all our components/delivery to allow clients to reduce their cost by using the ARM64 CPU architecture GitLab CI, BuildKit

Lead:

• Mentored newcomer developers to ramp up on the infrastructure, technical stack, product and best practices

• Worked with product to help define & prioritize new features and challenge technical difficulties

• Participated in the recruitment process, managing underperformance

• Participated in layoff decisions ... due to the previous economic situation

Lead Software Resiliency Engineer, Criteo in Paris

• Responsible for the NoSQL perimeter (>= 4000 server assets) Cassandra, Memcached, Couchbase, Kubernets, Ceph/Rook/S3

• Grew the team from 2 to 6 people, created a roadmap and built adhesion for quarterly, 9-month, and 12-month plans (interviews)

• Improved low-latency monitoring of Memcached C++, eBPF

• Stabilized and ensured resiliency of the Kubernetes platform

• Participated to put in place a new S3 object storage service with Ceph and migrated users to it Rook Ceph

• Participated to put in place security for Elasticsearch, Kubernetes, etcd LDAP, JWT, OIDC, TLS

• Developed a Memcached proxy and POC'd in production a replacement for the legacy Couchbase platform ScyllaDB

Senior Software Resiliency Engineer, Criteo in Paris

• Put in place Kubernetes at Criteo from scratch and migrated 3000 machines to it to reduce toil induced by managing bare-metal machines Chef, flannel

• Developed software to automate auto-failover of critical services Python, Couchbase

• Dropped commercial support (2M€ license fees) for Couchbase with new resiliency gains

• Took ownership of Elasticsearch and created a new stack for it Go, Java, Elasticsearch

• Worked to create a plan to migrate the S3 object store (pithos + Cassandra) to a more robust solution Minio, Ceph

• Handling the opening of 2 new datacenters and closing of 2 legacy ones without disruption of services

Software Resiliency Engineer, Criteo in Paris

• Managed NoSQL infrastructure (more than 4000 bare-metal servers) to provide it as a service Memcached, Couchbase, Cassandra

• Integrated a new monitoring system and discoverability to solve resiliency issues Prometheus, Consul

• Developed new monitoring probes to ensure the SLA and provide monitoring as a service by default Java, patch in Prometheus

Software Developer, Criteo in Paris

• Developed a time series database backend over Cassandra for Graphite Python, Java, Cassandra, Graphite

• Managed infrastructure as code Chef

• Wrote a patch merged upstream in Cassandra to meet Criteo R&D performance needs Java, CASSANDRA-13418

Software Developer, Orange in Sophia Antipolis

• Developed and put in production a machine learning model to detect anomalies in time series Java, Python, Spark, Cassandra, Hadoop, MapReduce, Jenkins

• Developed a Web API and UI to offer this ML model's anomaly detection as a service HTML/CSS, JavaScript, Bootstrap, D3JS, Java, Tomcat