I'm Hugo, a T-shaped engineer based in France with deep roots in infrastructure and branches that reach into code, security, and leadership.

15+ years in infrastructure · Led teams of 16 · Bare-metal to cloud-native · Web3/DeFi · Writes Go, Python & TypeScript daily

I've been tinkering with computers since I was a kid, got obsessed with hacking and security as a teenager, and never really stopped pulling things apart to understand how they work. That curiosity built a foundation that goes all the way down to the metal: racking servers, running fiber, designing network architectures (BGP, DNS, L2/L3/L4 load balancing), hardening Linux systems, and building automation long before "Infrastructure as Code" had a name.

Straight out of engineering school, I joined a few friends to bootstrap an ISP and datacenter company from the ground up. When you're building a business from scratch, you wear every hat ; designing the network, negotiating contracts, racking the servers, writing the tooling.. and that's how the early leadership titles came about. The opportunities grew organically from there (COO, Head of Engineering, Director), but I never let those titles pull me away from the keyboard. Staying hands-on is how I've always built and kept trust with the people I manage.

From there I moved up the stack : capacity planning, high-availability design and selling cloud migrations at scale.
I got into Kubernetes early, back when GKE was the only real managed offering and the rest of us were following Kubernetes The Hard Way as a manifesto, running clusters on bare-metal with Portworx for stateful storage on EMC VNX arrays. As managed offerings matured, I kept running Kubernetes everywhere I went, across AWS, Azure, GCP. So my experience isn't tied to a single cloud provider.

Having started at the physical layer means I understand why things work, not just how to configure them. That's the kind of intuition you can't shortcut.

My specialization is infrastructure, but I never stopped coding. I write Go, Python, TypeScript - whatever the problem calls for. These days I design and operate infrastructure for Web3 & DeFi platforms, where uptime isn't just a metric.

• 🏗️ Platform Engineering : Building and securing Kubernetes clusters (EKS) at scale, with a GitOps-first approach (Flux, Argo). Currently deep in Istio service mesh, SPIFFE/mTLS, and workload identity federation.
• 💻 Still Coding : Infrastructure is my backbone, but I'm hands-on in codebases daily. Whether it's writing operators in Go, building internal tooling, or shipping features for a personal project, I reach across the stack because that's where the interesting problems live.
• 🌐 Web3 Infrastructure : Operating resilient multi-region infrastructure for DeFi services processing large-scale trading volumes. Cost optimization, observability, and not panicking when things get spicy.
• 👥 Leadership (as an IC) : I've managed up to 16 DevOps engineers, led teams through 24/7 ops rotations, enterprise cloud migrations, and steered a company through acquisition (SKALE-5 → Deloitte). Today I'm an individual contributor by choice because DeFi/Web3 was an opportunity too exciting to pass up, even if it meant stepping off the management ladder. But the soft skills never switched off: I still mentor, collaborate across teams, navigate the politics, and try to steer momentum in the right direction. Whether the next chapter is IC or lead depends on how the wave-function collapses. 🎲
• 🔧 Tinkering — When I'm not in a terminal, I'm probably 3D printing something, automating my house with Home Assistant, or fixing some stuff around the house. My solar panels setup now has better observability than some production systems I've seen.

Cloud & Infra

GitOps & CI/CD

Observability

Service Mesh & Networking

Languages

Data

Web3

🧗 Sports Climbing and Bouldering
🖨️ 3D printing enthusiast
🏠 Home automation addict
🪚 Janitor of my own house
🇫🇷 French native · English fluent