About
Engineering Manager and CEO/CTO of ACCENSĒO, my own consulting and development company (4 people). 26 years of career: 13 years as an employee on critical IT systems, 18 years of entrepreneurship. Tomorrow, CTO of an early-stage startup or scale-up.
About
My approach as an engineering expert comes down to 3 words: human, conscious, responsible. Human in knowledge sharing and listening to teams. Conscious in technical choices and their effects. Responsible in the durability of the code, of commitments and of my own trajectory.
Engineering Manager passionate about Software Engineering, previously Technical Project Manager, Technical Lead and Senior Software Engineer. CEO and CTO of ACCENSĒO, my own consulting and software development company founded in 2024 (4 people). A deliberate dual track: one foot in team operations, one foot in technical leadership. Growing Engineering Teams, carrying a strategic vision, shipping ambitious products, tackling technical challenges: that is what drives me.
26 years of career: 13 years as an employee on critical IT systems and 18 as an entrepreneur, 7 positions held, 4 companies founded. It all started in 1999 with the founding of Celiane, my first company at 18 years old. First employee position in 2008 as a Webmaster at the French Ministry of Health, then 4 years on a B2B search engine, 3 years industrializing e-commerce sites with Symfony at Medialeads, a stint as a Magento Enterprise lead at Smile. Cofounder of AdsPower between 2016, a startup automating Google Ads campaigns with Machine Learning. Then 5 years at Groupe Pichet 2019-2024 transforming critical IT systems (ESB, PIM, DAM, ...) moving from Tech Lead to Project Manager to Engineering Manager, with management of a team of 1 to 7 developers.
On the ACCENSĒO side, I support SMEs and mid-market companies in trade, industry, and real estate: CTO advisory, custom development, IaC. I also designed and shipped several SaaS platforms (in real estate, accounting, ...), and I maintain a few open source projects.
To understand the genesis of this journey, I invite you to explore the page dedicated to Celiane: that is where it all started, at 18 years old, with my true first steps in software and entrepreneurship - and an early, tangible success that shaped the way I code, lead, and learn.
My Values
My approach as an engineering expert comes down to 3 words: human, conscious, responsible. Human in knowledge sharing and listening to teams. Conscious in technical choices and their effects. Responsible in the durability of the code, of commitments and of my own trajectory.
Autonomy is my deepest motivation - the same drive that has pushed me to build my own ventures for a long time, and that guides me toward every context where I can decide the technical trajectory. I need to be told what to achieve, not how: handed a direction and then trusted to choose the tools, organize the time, and arbitrate the trade-offs. Without that space to decide, I dim ; with it, I become tireless.
Easy problems bore me, and what really draws me in is understanding why a tool solves a problem and what it costs in complexity, debt and training. I love ill-posed problems, the ones that force you to invent a frame before offering a solution. I gladly adopt recent technologies - but always in full awareness, never by herd instinct. To me, innovation is the elegance of a solution chosen for the right reasons.
What drives me is achievement in all its forms: a system that runs, a polished presentation that carries a vision, a project led with rigor, a team that delivers. I love crafting - both a technical product and well-built slides - because each one carries a piece of the value we are trying to deliver. What impresses me the most is the moment that follows delivery - when I look at the result with a bit of distance and that quiet satisfaction settles in.
Learning is not optional for me, it is a physiological need. I document, I get certified, I dissect incident reviews, I practice pair programming - even when my schedule is saturated. I am going back to higher education alongside my operational responsibilities, and I keep stacking trainings and readings because standing still is impossible. I prefer teams and problems that confront me and force me to grow over comfortable contexts that would let me stagnate.
Technical quality is not a detail: it is what determines whether a team ships in 6 months or spends its time putting out fires. Standards of readable code, tests, observability and blameless post-mortems - all of it sustained over time, not just at launch. Rigor is not a posture: it is how I craft work that lasts, whether I have to ship code, secure a schedule or move a team forward without debt catching up with us.
Knowledge I keep to myself is knowledge that serves no one - and to me, that is unbearable. I document my decisions, I structure my feedback as proof rather than a judgment, I take the time to explain why before saying how. I trust demonstration more than authority: a team that understands its choices ships better than a team that obeys - and that is what turns supervision into collective uplift.
My Professional and Personal Project
Today Engineering Manager and CEO/CTO of ACCENSĒO. Tomorrow, CTO of an early-stage startup or scale-up?
Vision
My project has 2 horizons.
- •Short term: stay CTO of ACCENSĒO or return as Engineering Manager in a company (open to any opportunity).
- •Mid term: take technical leadership of a large early-stage startup or scale-up as CTO, cofounder or not.
Ambition: defend a technical vision at the executive table, build or shape a team, set an architecture, arbitrate technical debt, ...
Professional Goals
- •Lead B2B SaaS product engineering: roadmap, hiring, individual and collective performance, review, feedback, and coaching cycles, scaling beyond that.
- •Work with data at scale: data-intensive systems architecture, pipelines, business intelligence and data visualization. Manipulating massive volumes and turning them into readable decisions is what truly drives me in engineering.
- •Integrate generative AI: workflow, automation, development cycles, review, compliance, business processes, value creation. Imagining tomorrow's processes.
- •Industrialize project delivery: AI is already transforming how projects are run. Rethinking traditional frameworks - SAFe, Scrum, Kanban, OKRs, ...
- •Build autonomous teams: delegate, refocus my role on vision, hiring, unblocking, and feedback. Leadership, not command and control.
- •Sustain an author's practice: articles, documentation, open source, write-ups, technical talks. knowledge sharing is not an option, it is my reason for being.
Personal Aspiration
Build long-lived products inside organizations where technical decisions are made quickly, ownership is taken seriously, and promises made to customers are kept. My entrepreneurial path, from Celiane in 1999 to ACCENSĒO in 2024, is not anecdotal: it is a reminder that expertise is earned and that learning has no age. I wish to contribute to environments where the same rule applies to teams.
My Key Human Qualities
Qualities anchored in 26 years of career across software engineering, project management, and technical leadership.
I love breaking down complex problems, building mental models and keeping a systems view of dependencies between components and between teams. That is what carries me through software architecture as much as through multi-stakeholder project leadership.
I read every day, I explore frameworks, I follow technical debates and lessons from other companies. This curiosity feeds my active monitoring and helps me anticipate technology shifts - learning is breathing - without it, I shut down.
Rigor is not a posture for me: it is my only way to hold a roadmap over time. I organize myself carefully, I finish what I start despite distractions, I follow through on the commitments I make and the schedules I announce.
I believe a team never follows an order, it follows a direction it understands - and one it sees embodied by whoever carries it. I mobilize through meaning, I decide quickly, and I lead by demonstration rather than by authority.
In my view, micro-management destroys engagement faster than it corrects mistakes. I do my best to delegate operational tasks and I keep some technical tasks, vision, hiring, unblocking and feedback for myself.
Faced with an incident or a blocker, I start with a status assessment, decompose into sub-problems, and build a measurable action plan. Emotional reaction never bought time or quality.
When the project carries meaning, I produce a phenomenal amount of work in a flow hyperfocus state, I push through without stopping and I keep the commitments I make.
I build my trajectory step by step. Obstacles are real, but I would rather ask what I can do than wait for the situation to sort itself out. This conviction has stayed with me for a long time: each step taken matters more than the destination.
My Main Interests
Technical building, strategic vision, project delivery, continuous learning, and what happens outside work.
Want to talk?
If you are leading an ambitious project - an early-stage startup to launch, a scale-up to structure, a SaaS product to industrialize - and you are looking for an Engineering Manager or a CTO to build the team, secure delivery, and carry the technical vision at the executive table, do not hesitate to contact me.
Contact meMy Personality Test Results
Several psychometric assessments have shaped my self-understanding in depth. Detailed results are linked below.
Hover to learn more about each methodology - Click to access my detailed results