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About me

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 Atoms. I'm based in New York.

Previous work experiences include:

  • 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 classifieds community 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 software engineer, then moving to an engineering manager role. I was lucky to join as engineer #20.
  • 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
  • Philosophy

Blog

The blog is where I express my (usually controversial!) opinions. Those 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This page might be outdated.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 member of technical staff at Atoms, a physical automation startup. He is passionate about full stack coding (with a preference for back-end and infra), building high-performance engineering teams that deliver products with a profound impact on the physical world (for instance at Uber, where he was among the first twenty engineers). 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

Work experience

Engineering Manager, Atoms, New York

At the intersection of manufacturing, real estate and food, connecting the digital and physical worlds with software.

CTO, Octopize

  • Managed the data science and data engineering team.
  • Wrote Python, TypeScript, Rust code
  • Created the infra (Terraform and Pulumi) on GCP, Azure, and AWS

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

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

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

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

Engineering Manager, Uber (July 2013 - November 2017)

Managed engineering teams. Started new products.

Software Engineer, Uber (2012 - 2013)

At Uber ("everyone's private driver"), I worked on our Python and Javascript codebases. Here's a couple libraries I have open sourced (now unmaintained):

  • 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.

Two of the white papers I co-authored have been featured on TechCrunch and were very well received:

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".