Alexandre Héaumé

Software Engineer / Site Reliability Engineer

alexandre à heau.me • https://aheaume.com

I am a skilled engineer comfortable in fast-paced environments, with experience in both dev and ops roles. I thrive when building simple and robust systems that empower users to build a better future. I am open-minded, curious and collaborative.


Experience

Engineer at La Fabrique des Communs Pédagogiques

since December 2022

At La Fabrique Des Communs Pédagogiques I managed the infrastructure for the Rencontres Internationales de la Classe Dehors and provided IT support for everyone who asked.

Engineer at Wave

February 2022 to August 2022

At Wave, I worked with Asterisk, Kamailio and Twilio to build better telephony services for their call center operations in Africa. Most of my time was spent ramping up my skills on their stack, making adjustments to the internal tooling that supports it along the way.

Site Reliabilty Engineer at Claranet

April 2019 to January 2022

As an SRE for one of the top haute-couture brand, I made sure their worldwide e-commerce website was running smoothly 24/7 as well as all mission-critical infrastructure (integration, testing, staging and production), helped them automate their workflows to increase deployment quality and improve incident response, trained our staff to perform new operations, and maintained the documentation and runbooks up-to-date. In 2021, we migrated most of the infrastructure to be hosted on AWS and managed using Terraform and Ansible. On-call 25% of the time, I was constantly in touch with the client’s technical teams as well as their project managers. The main challenge was balancing the breakneck speed of production changes flowing in from the development teams while maintaining system availability, always alternating between communication, automation and production requirements.

Software Engineer at Mobizel

October 2017 to March 2019

My main task was to rescue a mobile application backend written in PHP for the Université de Nantes after the main developers left. To do this, I had to learn PHP from scratch and become familiar with a new codebase in a matter of weeks without any help. After a year of hard work and a rewrite of several key components for performance, the application was released. I also wrote several backend servers in PHP and Python for other clients, working in close relationship with mobile developers.

Software Engineer at Scalian

January 2017 to September 2017

I helped Pages Jaunes deploy a new geographic query Python backend to make sure their prototype was production-ready, fixing outstanding bugs in their prototype and stress testing it.

For Kering I worked on automating deployments of several batch systems with Ansible.

Software Engineer at Forcity

August 2015 to January 2017

As part of the simulation backend team, I lead the work to design several prototypes to schedule the execution of simulation models in docker containers on-demand, in close interaction with the PhDs writing the simulations and the frontend team to display the results, making sure that the models were not only accurate, but performant as well. Our geopraphic API was written with Django and PostGIS, and the models in C++. As the ops team was overwhelmed, I also built reproducible environments for our software with Ansible. A challenging job in an always-evolving startup environment.

Backpacker

Australia & New Zealand • April 2014 to March 2015

With only a car, a tent and a few books, I traveled around Australia and New Zealand, enjoying life and learning to be more self-reliant.

Software Engineer at Alyotech

August 2010 to April 2014

As part of the Web Apps division, I worked on several backend applications and Android applications as a Java developper for clients such as Orange and SFR.

As part of the Scientific Computation division, I implemented several algorithms use in Alyotech’s simulations, such as an octree-based voxel compression algorithm in C++ to reduce the size of huge 3D scenes and a CUDA/C raytracer to simulate an in-flight radar.

Software Engineer at Ubiflow

intern • January 2009 to January 2010

I used GWT/Java to generate previews of classified ads as they would appear in print, as well as various reporting and metrics applications written in PHP and JavaScript.


Skills & Tools

Complex system debugging and general problem solving, automation, API and protocol development, runbook redaction and application, mentoring, project planning, communication with stakeholders

Python, JavaScript, Java, PHP, C, C++, Ansible, AWS, Terraform, Linux, NixOS, Docker, Postgres, MariaDB, Emacs Lisp, Racket, Elixir, Haskell, ...


Education

Master of Science in Engineering with distinction from ESIEA in 2009


Certification

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (2019)


Languages


Hobbies

Reading, hiking, badminton, strategy games