Staff Engineer & Technology Leader | 12+ Years Scaling Global Platforms
Former Staff SRE at Canva, where I architected infrastructure for 250M+ MAUs. From SF to Sydney, I’ve spent over a decade building data-intensive systems and leading high-growth tech orgs.
Now based in Annecy, France, I help startups improve their operational readiness and production-grade AI integrations.
A bad hire is incredibly expensive: salary, recruiting fees, technical debt, and toll on team morale. Yet, interviewers still rely on the wrong signals. After running over a hundred interviews in the past couple of years, I want to share the common traits I’ve been looking for as an interviewer to help de-risk the hiring decision. Software engineering was never about writing code; it’s always been about solving business problems. Despite this, most companies I’ve talked to in the past 12 months are still interviewing with LeetCode and Kubernetes trivia. If an AI agent can pass your technical test, not only is your process broken but you’re also sending a bad signal about your engineering culture. ...
“It’s just a quick fix.” A few years ago, shortly after joining a scale-up, I was handed a task as part of my onboarding: “Add an autoscaler to this ECS service to reduce the cost of unused compute. It shouldn’t take more than half a day.” At first, it sounded straightforward. The service was significantly overprovisioned with very little load. A rough estimate suggested we could reduce the fleet size by 80% and immediately cut costs. It looked like an easy win, so I implemented it. ...