Damien Beaufils
Senior Engineering Manager with nearly 20 years in software, currently leading an 18-person engineering org at Kumojin with 15 direct reports. I'm a hands-on manager who still architects, develops, and reviews code. Most recently I led technical strategy on a multi-tenant SaaS with 30+ applications, where I designed event-driven systems in production, cut infrastructure costs by 30%, and modernized 12 legacy projects across multiple stacks with the help of AI tooling.
On the org side, I bring a structured, follow-through approach to people management and technical delivery. I work cross-functionally with product and business teams on staffing, roadmap planning, delivery, and technical strategy. I've hired 30+ engineers across my career and defined AI adoption strategies for engineering teams, including tooling selection, usage guidelines, and quality guardrails. Previously spent 4 years as CTO at Zenika Canada after relocating from France in 2018, and grew the team from 15 to about 40 people.
My background is in backend systems, cloud platforms, and distributed architectures, with years of leading remote teams across time zones. Consulting taught me to read new environments fast and improve engineering practices. I speak at conferences on AI adoption, remote leadership, and software quality. I'm now looking for a product company where I can invest in teams and systems for the long term.
Experience
Director of Engineering
Director of Engineering at a Quebec-based software firm, where I lead an 18-person technical organization across multiple SaaS products. I manage 15 people, including team leads, delivery managers, and senior engineers, and delegate daily execution to the leads. I own hiring and staffing, run performance and career development processes, and contribute to leadership decisions on planning, staffing, and execution. I also step in as hands-on technical lead on SaaS products when they need senior architecture guidance or when delivery goes off track.
- Manage 15 direct reports with biweekly one-on-ones focused on career growth, retention, performance, and psychological safety
- Hired 6 engineers since joining, and ran the full process from job definition to onboarding
- Run semi-annual evaluations and coordinate professional development across teams. Handle performance issues through clear expectations, structured feedback, and follow-through
- Coach and support team leaders and delivery managers on delivery outcomes, team health, and technical standards
- Contribute to company operating cadence through management committees, business development, and staffing decisions
- Standardized quality and security tooling across teams: static analysis (SonarQube), dependency updates and vulnerability fixes (Dependabot, Renovate), and linters and ArchUnit rules in CI
- Lead technical and functional framing workshops for new products, covering product vision, scope, roles, and risks
- Implemented structured estimation and project tracking processes for new project kickoffs
- Primary escalation point for cross-team delivery blockers, dependency conflicts, and staffing tradeoffs across products
- Defined and deployed AI adoption strategy for the engineering organization: piloted and evaluated AI-assisted development tools against a scorecard, with a security and licensing review, then rolled out the selected ones with usage guidelines and quality guardrails. Built shared AI coding-agent tooling and coached teams on using it daily, including spec-driven development
- Hands-on technical leadership on client SaaS products:
- [UseDrop (US), Jan 2025-present] Fractional CTO for a multi-tenant conversational marketing SaaS with 30+ applications. Defined the technical strategy and cut infrastructure costs by more than 30% across AWS, Datadog, and OpenAI through FinOps work and capacity right-sizing. Upgraded all dependencies across 12 projects (PHP/Laravel, C#, NestJS, React, databases, infrastructure) abandoned for 3 to 5 years, using AI coding agents and prompt engineering, then added automated updates and static analysis to keep them current. Set up SLOs and Datadog alerting, and run incident response and blameless postmortems. Ship behind feature flags and use product-usage and Datadog telemetry to decide what to build or fix next. Oversee production OpenAI LLM features that classify inbound messages by sentiment and generate or improve marketing copy. Stack: AWS (Lambda, SQS, DynamoDB, RDS, ECS, OpenSearch, EventBridge), NestJS, React, GraphQL, PHP/Laravel, C#, OpenAI, Shopify and Meta integrations.
- [Prediko (GB), Sep-Oct 2025] Designed event-driven architecture for a Shopify inventory SaaS, resolving deduplication, ordering, and idempotency issues that affected operational reliability. Stack: GCP (Pub/Sub, Cloud Run, Cloud Functions, Memorystore), MongoDB, Python.
- [Paren (US), Apr-Dec 2024] Senior backend developer on a B2B SaaS for EV charging data analysis. Improved data pipelines, modularized the codebase, and raised test coverage. Stack: Go.
Fractional CTO & Senior Technical Consultant
Independent activity focused on fractional CTO work, technical due diligence, architecture reviews, and modernization. Each project started the same way: learn the environment fast, figure out what's blocking the team, and help them ship better.
- [Decathlon (FR), Apr 2023 - Apr 2024] Senior developer on Linqueo, maintaining backend and frontend apps for product defect management. Led Java 8-to-21 and major Spring Boot migrations, on-premise to GCP cloud migration, and legacy code refactoring. Defined SLOs and Datadog alerting, and led incident response and postmortems. Team of 6 across France, Quebec, and South Korea. Stack: Java, Spring Boot, Angular, Kubernetes, GCP, PostgreSQL, Datadog.
- [Skales (FR), May-Jun 2023] Technical advisor for an early-stage startup. Delivered an architecture review, a CI/CD strategy, and coaching on agile and testing practices for the team and CEO.
- [Maya-Systems (CA), Feb-Mar 2023] Audited and migrated 3 legacy applications to Spring Boot. Managed the roadmap and reported weekly to partners. Stack: Java, Spring, Maven, SQL Server.
CTO & Senior Consultant
CTO of Zenika's Canadian business. Grew the organization from 15 to about 40 people over 4 years while leading hiring, career development, budget, business development, and technical strategy. Combined running the engineering organization with hands-on work in technical audits, coaching, and product delivery for clients.
- Grew the agency from 15 to ~40 people over 4 years, hiring 15+ consultants through sourcing, technical interviews, and onboarding
- Managed ~20 consultants as a career coach, including senior consultants and tech leads. Tracked progression, supported junior ramp-up, and guided certification paths
- Co-led business development, answered RFPs, met clients, and represented Zenika's technical expertise
- Owned the annual CTO budget and participated in strategic decision-making
- [KPI Digital (CA), Sep-Oct 2022] Led technical framing of a frontend application for a strategic project. Delivered architecture recommendations covering tools, frameworks, automation, quality, and security practices. Presented findings to the CEO and stakeholders.
- [BNP Paribas (CA), Jan-Apr 2022] Technical auditor assessing development quality practices across 4 teams in India and North America. Conducted interviews and maturity surveys across 5 axes (testing, code ownership, code quality, architecture, DevOps). Recommendations based on DORA Accelerate. Automated Excel report generation with metrics and trend graphs.
- [Arthur Intelligence (CA), Apr-Jun 2021] Technical advisor to a startup CTO. Reviewed IS and technical architecture, audited the delivery process, and advised on hiring decisions.
- [Intact Insurance - Market Value (CA), May 2020 - Aug 2021] Senior developer and engineering coach on a vehicle market value analysis product. Trained a 5-person team on TDD, clean code, and pair programming. Ran biweekly code katas. Stack: Java 11, Spring Boot, Angular 11, TypeScript, OpenShift.
- [Lightspeed HQ (CA), Feb-May 2020] Technical auditor assessing development quality across 12+ teams in Canada and Europe. Surveyed 200+ engineers across 5 maturity axes. Presented findings to the CPO, VP Product, and team managers.
- [Genium360 (CA), Sep 2019 - Feb 2020] Tech Lead building an MVP career platform for Quebec engineers. Owned technical framing, architecture, and CI/CD from day one. Applied TDD, clean code, and pair programming throughout. Stack: TypeScript, Nuxt.js, NestJS, PostgreSQL, GitLab CI.
- [Intact Insurance - FiLo (CA), Mar-Aug 2019] Senior developer and coach on a first-notice-of-loss claims platform. Architecture designed for 13,000 claims in 6 hours during environmental disasters. Coached a 6-person team on TDD and legacy refactoring. Stack: Java 8, Spring Boot, OpenShift, IBM MQ, SQL Server.
- [Agence Tink / Metro (CA), Nov 2018 - Feb 2019] Senior developer on e-commerce backends for Metro.ca, Foodbasics, and Super-C apps. Designed import modules for mass mobile coupons, built loyalty card generation, profiled and fixed resource consumption issues. Stack: Java 8, Spring Boot/Batch, SQL Server.
Senior Consultant & Tech Lead
Senior consultant and tech lead at OCTO Technology, a Paris-based technology consultancy. Managed 5 consultants as a career coach outside of engagements, and led teams of 5 to 10 developers in operational management during Tech Lead engagements. This is where I cut my teeth on product delivery at scale, technical audits, and coaching engineers on high-traffic and business-critical systems. Co-led the Software Craftsmanship practice group.
- [Roland-Garros, Sep 2017 - Sep 2018] Tech Lead on the complete rebuild of rolandgarros.com. Handled 35M unique visitors during the 2018 tournament (4B cumulative queries, 5500 req/s peak, 300K simultaneous users). Led a team of 4 with TDD, clean code, and mob programming from day one. Stack: Java 8, Spring Boot 2, Nuxt.js, Docker, OpenShift, MySQL.
- [EDF, Jun-Sep 2017] Technical auditor. Assessed architecture and software quality of a third-party product. Delivered prioritized recommendations by importance, urgency, and cost to the BU director.
- [Oodrive, Apr-Jun 2017] Tech Lead on Insider Room, a MAR-compliant insider list management app for CAC 40 companies. Team of 3, with encrypted data handling. Stack: Java 8, Spring Boot, Angular 4, GitLab CI.
- [Service-Public.fr, Feb 2016 - Feb 2017] Tech Lead on the French government's official administration portal. Team of 11 developers. Handled 50,000 daily online submissions (75/min peak) during voter registration. Coached the team on TDD, clean code, and pair programming. Ran biweekly one-on-ones and trained an internal Tech Lead successor. Stack: Java 8, Spring, PostgreSQL, Ansible.
- [Roland-Garros Ticketing, Jun 2015 - Feb 2016] Senior developer on the online ticketing platform. Peak of 100 orders/min during public sales opening. Built SPAs with Backbone and SOAP-to-REST connectors. Stack: Java 8, Play Framework, Docker, MySQL.
- [AXA, Feb-Sep 2015] Engineering coach during agile transformation. Coached the internal Software Craftsmanship community facilitator and Tech Leads on TDD, BDD, clean code, and legacy refactoring.
- [Canal+ International, Jun 2013 - Mar 2015] Software developer on the international broadcasting IS (25 apps, 800K LOC). Agile development, CI/CD management, and technical debt reduction. Stack: Java 7, Groovy/Grails, Spring, MySQL.
Teacher
Taught agile methods (Scrum, Kanban) to 2nd-year engineering students at EPITA (2014-2016). Taught C++ and Java development to Computer Science undergraduates at Université Paris-Sud (2008-2010).
Mobile Engineer & Technical Lead
Technical lead on Java and HTML5/JavaScript/CSS3 technologies. Built mobile-optimized websites and applications for major French brands including Groupama, Crédit Agricole, SFR, Voyages-SNCF, and Pôle-Emploi. Stack: Java 7, Spring, Hibernate, JavaScript, Sencha Touch, jQuery Mobile, MySQL.
Software Developer
Software development across research, rail, and banking. Built internal tools, RESTful web services for scientific data sharing, and web apps. Stacks: Java, Spring, C#, PHP, PostgreSQL, MySQL.
Skills & Tools
Education
SUPINFO
Université Paris-Sud
Institut Universitaire de Technologie (I.U.T.) d'Orsay
Publications
Generative AI in your teams: quiet evolution, announced chaos, or the new normal of software development?
Conference talk for engineering managers on adopting generative AI in software teams. It covers the impact on productivity and quality, how to define adoption strategies, how to manage risks, and practical guidance for rolling out AI-assisted development tools.
Effective strategies to maintain team dynamics and technical excellence in remote work
Conference talk about practical approaches for keeping distributed engineering teams engaged, productive, and technically sharp while working fully remote.
Code coverage: a watermelon indicator?
Conference talk about why code coverage is a non-quality indicator, and how mutation testing can measure the real effectiveness of automated tests.