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This page might be outdated.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".