dein.fr

Hi, I'm Charles-Axel Dein!

I'm a software engineer and engineering manager.

I'm currently an engineering manager at a Stealth Startup based in New York.

My previous work experiences include:

  • 1 year as CTO of Octopize, a startup which built an anonymization algorithm based on synthetic data generation.
  • 1.5 years as VP of Engineering at Gens de Confiance, a community with unique safety feature, providing a scam-free classifieds experience.
  • 2 years of founding a legaltech startup (Skrib), building its back-end (Go and Python), front-end (React, TypeScript) and infra (Terraform, AWS) from scratch. Its main product was leveraging NLP (natural language processing) to analyze contracts and automate follow-up tasks.
  • 5 years at Uber in San Francisco and Amsterdam, starting as software engineer, then moving to an engineering manager role.
  • 2 years of innovation consulting at faberNovel in Paris and San Francisco.

My areas of interest are:

  • Startup entrepreneurship
  • Software engineering
  • Engineering management
  • Design & typography
  • Education
  • History
  • Literature
  • Woodworking

I completed a Masters at Sciences Po Rennes, studying the four Sciences Po domains: Law, Economy, History and Political Sciences. I majored in Economy & Finance. I also completed a one-year curriculum at engineering school École Centrale Paris, majoring in Technology and Management.

Feel free to contact me via email (charles@dein.fr)

This page might be outdated. Checkout my LinkedIn profile: www.linkedin.com/in/charlesaxeldein.

Short biography

Here's a short biography you can use:

Charles-Axel Dein (aka Charlax) is currently an engineering manager at a stealth startup. He is passionate about building high-performance engineering teams that deliver great product with a deep impact on the physical world. His previous software development and engineering management experiences include faberNovel (Paris and San Francisco), Uber (San Francisco and Amsterdam) and Gens de Confiance (Nantes): building products from idea to millions of users, scaling services to hundreds of thousands of request per second, developing 50+ people teams from scratch. He enjoys spending time with his family, developing software, and reading about history and woodworking!

Skills

My area of expertise are:

  • Building high-performance organizations
    • Hiring engineers and managers: process, interviews, sourcing, training, countering biases
    • Managing performance and giving feedback
    • Achieving quality and speed (testing, code reviews, etc.)
    • Maintaining reliability (incident response, monitoring, etc.)
    • Fostering continuous learning
    • Conducting 1-1
    • Increasing your personal productivity
    • Implementing simple project management processes
  • Scaling products and technologies
    • Full stack development
    • Devops
    • Security best practices

Work experience

CTO, Octopize

Managing the data science and data engineering team.

VP of Engineering, Gens de Confiance (Jan 2020 - Sept 2021)

  • Managing back-end and front-end team
  • Contributing to back-end, front-end and infra code
  • Stack: PHP, TypeScript, React, Terraform, Python, AWS

Cofounder and CEO, Skrib (Jan 2018 - Dec 2019)

Built the whole stack:

  • Front-end: React
  • Back-end: Python and Go
  • Infrastructure: AWS, terraform, lambda

Engineering Manager, Uber (July 2013 - November 2017)

I have managed a couple engineering teams since July 2013.

Software Developer, Uber (2012 - 2013)

At Uber ("everyone's private driver"), I worked on our Python and Javascript codebase, writing and improving existing web applications (back-end and front-end). Here's a couple libraries I have open sourced:

  • charlatan: a Python library to efficiently manage and install database fixtures
  • cassette: store and replay HTTP requests made in your Python app

faberNovel (2010-2012)

faberNovel helps big companies think and act like startups. I took part in strategic consulting missions, as well as designed and implemented new services & products for large companies.

I participated in two of faberNovel's annual white papers. Both have been featured on TechCrunch and were very well received:

Education

I studied law, history, economy and political sciences at Sciences Po Rennes, then went to the engineering school École Centrale Paris (now CentraleSupélec) to study technology & strategy in Paris, France.

I wrote a dissertation titled "Google Chrome: Free Software as a launching platform".