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.
Contact
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This page might be outdated.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
Please check my LinkedIn profile for the latest information.
Engineering Manager, Stealth Startup, New York
At the intersection of manufacturing, real estate and food, connecting the digital and physical worlds with software.
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 of engineering teams.
Software Engineer, Uber (2012 - 2013)
At Uber ("everyone's private driver"), I worked on our Python and Javascript codebases, 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".