Hi, I'm Charles-Axel Dein!
I'm a software engineer and a hands-on engineering manager.
I'm currently a hands-on Engineering Manager at Datadog. I'm based in Nantes, France.
Previous work experiences include:
- 4 years as Director of Engineering at Atoms (a.k.a. CloudKitchens) in New York, connecting digital and physical worlds with software. I managed teams building software for restaurant, kitchen facilities, and delivery platforms. We built Picnic.
- 1 year as CTO of Octopize, a deep-tech startup which built an anonymization algorithm based on synthetic data generation.
- 1.5 years as VP of Engineering at Gens de Confiance, a social network for classifieds with unique safety & scam prevention features.
- 2 years of founding a legaltech startup (Skrib), building its back-end (Python and Go), front-end (React, TypeScript) and infra (Terraform, AWS) from scratch. Its main product was leveraging NLP (natural language processing) to analyze legal contracts and automate follow-up tasks.
- 5 years at Uber in San Francisco and Amsterdam, starting as a software engineer, then moving to an engineering manager role. I was lucky to join among the first 20 engineers.
- 2 years of innovation consulting at faberNovel ("helping large companies think and act like startups") in Paris and San Francisco.
My areas of interest are:
- Startup entrepreneurship
- Software engineering
- Engineering management
- Design & typography
- Education
- History
- Literature
- Woodworking
- Philosophy
Blog
The blog is where I express my (usually controversial!) opinions. They do not reflect my past or present employers' opinion.
Contact
Feel free to contact me via email (charles at 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This page might be outdated.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 is a senior engineering manager at Datadog, the leading provider of observability-as-a-platform. He's passionate about using software to solve real-world problems, and building high-performance teams. He enjoys spending time with his family, woodworking, developing software, and reading about everything (particularly classical literature, history & philosophy)!
Skills
My areas of expertise are:
- Building high-performance software engineering teams
- Hiring engineers and managers: interviews, sourcing, training
- Achieving quality and speed (testing, code reviews, etc.)
- Managing performance and providing feedback
- Maintaining and improving reliability (incident response, monitoring, observability, etc.)
- Inspiring a culture of continuous learning & improvement
- Increasing your personal productivity
- Implementing impactful project management processes
- Building and scaling software
- Full stack development (back-end, front-end, infrastructure)
- Devops & infrastructure
- Security
- UX/UI design
Talks
- High growth startups: Uber and CloudKitchens with Gergely Orosz (The Pragmatic Engineer)
- (DevFest Nantes 2017) The great SOA migration
Writings
- Patient-centric synthetic data generation, no reason to risk re-identification in biomedical data analysis, Morgan Guillaudeux, Olivia Rousseau, Julien Petot, Zineb Bennis, Charles-Axel Dein, Thomas Goronflot, Nicolas Vince, Sophie Limou, Matilde Karakachoff, Matthieu Wargny & Pierre-Antoine Gourraud, 2023
- Amazon.com: the Hidden Empire (2011)
- Apple: 8 easy steps to beat Microsoft and Google (2010)
Education
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.
I wrote a dissertation titled "Google Chrome: Free Software as a launching platform".