Careers
From Pentest to Blockchain Engineering
I started my career in security as a professional hacker. My work included red teaming across applications and infrastructure, exploiting vulnerabilities from application logic down to network protocols and hardware. I also built security tooling and responded to incidents. From there, I moved into building and shipping systems: application frameworks, CQRS and event-driven platforms, and later data-intensive job serialisation using distributed systems (Spark Streaming).
That big-data and streaming work deepened my focus on distributed systems, where throughput, coordination, reliability, and operational behaviour are part of the design. Blockchain was the natural next step: distributed systems with protocol rules, incentives, execution, and markets built into the architecture. That progression now anchors my work across blockchain infrastructure, Solana trading systems, and L1 protocol and client engineering.
Chronology
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Trading markets Dec 2025–present
Founding engineer for trading markets
Since December 2025, I have been working as a founding engineer on a Solana trading platform. The role spans the full product surface: onchain programs and contract optimisation, offchain services and market infrastructure, proprietary AMM design, CLOB-style execution, scalability work, and the infrastructure as code needed to operate the system reliably under real load.
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Company building Raiku · founding experience
Raiku: co-founder and hands-on CTO
I co-founded Raiku and helped grow the company from zero to 20 people while taking engineering from zero to 10. I stayed hands-on through architecture, hiring, product definition, and delivery while leading fundraising and investor diligence, raising more than $13M from pre-seed through seed.
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Protocol 2023 · Ethereum Protocol Fellowship
Ethereum Foundation: Lighthouse and Beacon Chain internals
Through the Ethereum Protocol Fellowship, which I was doing while also working full time as a team lead at Kiln, I worked on Lighthouse and Beacon Chain internals in Rust, mostly around consensus-layer behaviour, performance, metrics, and debugging. That included open-source work on Lighthouse around the attestation simulator and performance instrumentation, alongside work on the implications of single-slot finality, especially what it could mean for hardware requirements, validator location, and the operator footprint of the chain.
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Staking 2022–2023 · Kiln
Kiln: validator platforms and operator-grade systems
At Kiln I led one of the backend engineering teams working on validator infrastructure and validator-as-a-service systems across Ethereum and other proof-of-stake networks. The scope ran from shared Go and Rust foundations and internal CI to SLAs, monitoring, alerting, and the day-to-day boundary between software teams and operator reality. I was also already working on validator economics, improving APY and operator returns, and shipping targeted client or stack changes where there was room to improve.
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Platform 2019–2022 · Yinkozi
Yinkozi: principal engineering for security products
At Yinkozi I led engineering and architecture for two security products across Go, Scala, React, gRPC/Protobuf, Terraform, Kubernetes, Prometheus, and ELK. In practice that meant shaping the architecture, building the platform, and keeping delivery standards high while the team was still moving quickly.
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DevSecOps 2017–2019 · Zendesk
Zendesk: security controls at infrastructure scale
At Zendesk I led DevSecOps work across EMEA, running threat modelling and security reviews with product and infrastructure teams. A lot of the work was about getting security controls into the actual delivery path: CI/CD, application architecture, key management, RBAC, and internal libraries. When the harder issues landed in infrastructure or code, I patched them myself instead of stopping at recommendations.
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Consulting 2016–2017 · Octo / Amadeus
Octo / Amadeus: global slot auctions and distributed systems
Through Octo, I moved to Australia to work on Amadeus and a hard travel-infrastructure problem: the system used to bid, reallocate, and manage plane slots and parking capacity across airports at global scale. It had to ingest signals from everywhere, including operational feeds, weather, strikes, crew issues, and last-minute incidents, and turn them into decisions with real operational and commercial consequences. Alongside that, I worked on cross-region Kafka architecture, broker frameworks, Couchbase automation, AWS infrastructure, and performance testing. It was distributed systems work where latency, coordination, and reliability were part of the business model.
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Event-driven systems 2015–2016 · Viadeo
Viadeo: CQRS, event-driven platforms, and Spark Streaming
At Viadeo I built and shipped application frameworks and real-time anti-abuse platforms across React, J2EE/CQRS services, event-driven systems, expression-based rules, DynamoDB, Spark, and Spark Streaming in AWS. That work became the bridge from application and security engineering into data-intensive distributed systems.
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Professional hacking 2011–2015 · BULL / ATOS
BULL / ATOS: red teaming, pentest, and security engineering
At BULL / ATOS I worked across red teaming, pentesting, incident response, vulnerability assessment, threat modelling, malware analysis, and code review, while building tooling and deployment pipelines and mentoring engineers. The value of that period was the range: you had to understand how systems actually broke, across many different stacks, not just how they were documented.
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Teaching Age 24 · External lecturer
External teaching: assembly and low-level security
At 24, while already working full time in security, I was also teaching as an external lecturer for final-year engineering students. The course was about assembly and low-level security, which meant teaching the mechanics underneath the abstractions most people use every day.
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Government Age 20 · Government + degree
Recruited through international CTFs
International CTFs led to me being recruited by the French government at 20, while I was still finishing my engineering degree. I was working full time in that environment and completing a security-focused engineering program in parallel. Starting there made rigor, discretion, and technical depth part of the baseline very early.
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Adversarial Ages 16–18 · IUT + CoP
C, security tooling, and hacking competition
By 16 I was writing C, building security tooling, and experimenting with malware. By 18, while studying application and network engineering in a French IUT, I was competing internationally with CoP, Consortium of Pwners. That period gave me a practical grounding in exploitation, reverse engineering, and low-level systems.
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Start Ages 13–15 · Early internet era
Kyubii and Rain: fansub teams, websites, and release ops
From 13 to 15, I built and ran Kyubii and Rain, two manga and anime fansub teams, back when streaming platforms were not part of the picture and distribution had to be organized manually. I maintained the PHP and HTML sites, coordinated translation and adaptation, managed about 10 people, handled distribution, and learned release mechanics through Lua karaoke scripting, After Effects, and Python automation in IRC.