Olivier Laviale Staff Engineer

Hi! I'm Olivier 👋 Welcome to my blog. I write about what I do as a Staff Engineer, my open-source projects, and software development in general. I enjoy a bit of singing, in a choir or a karaoke bar, but I don't write about that. I'm originally from Toulouse (France), but I've been living in Berlin since 2014. Still wearing colors, though.

You can browse my articles on the home page or check my résumé below. You can also find me on GitHub and LinkedIn.

Professional Summary

A seasoned Staff Engineer with over 10 years of experience designing and implementing large-scale software systems. Proven track record of leading cross-functional teams to deliver high-impact projects that drive business growth. Expert in cloud architecture, distributed systems, and performance optimization. Skilled in mentoring and fostering a culture of technical excellence. Acknowledged for innovative problem-solving and the ability to quickly translate complex technical concepts into actionable strategies.

Reference letters

• HelloFresh
• Personio

Skills

• Project Management
• Team ceremonies
• Best practices: Event storming, Domain-driven design, Pair-programming, Application layering, Hexagonal architecture, Testing
• Programming languages: C#, Go, JavaScript, PHP, C, ASM 680x0
• Human languages: French (native), English (fluent), German (A2.1), Spanish (notions)
• Data stores: MySQL, Postgres, SQL server, MongoDB, Redis
• Infrastructure: Kubernetes, Ambassador, AWS
• System Design: PlantUML, OpenAPI, AsyncAPI

Experience

Personio・Staff Engineer | June 2023–October 2024・Berlin

I joined the Payroll tribe in full throttle to add payroll to the HR tool and pass the German certification. We delivered a satisfactory solution in time for the audit and passed the certification a few months later. Our customers were eager to migrate to our "real time" Payroll solution.

During my time at Personio I lead several projects:

• Migration of customers to Legal Entities and Permanent Establishments; and tackling the tech-debt related to that transition.
• Replace the usage of Health Insurance Providers at the company level.
• Coordinated a multi-team effort to remove over 100 feature flags that accumulated during development.
• Created troubleshooting pages for frequent configuration errors that helped agents fix mistakes without involving developers.
• Fixed the usage of multiple custom compensations that weren't tracked or reported correctly during the generation of gross to net documents.
• Created an automated system to count the number of employees participating in payroll each month, integrated with our billing solution, that replaced the fastidious and error-prone manual work.

Wayfair・Staff Engineer | Oct. 2021–Apr. 2023・Berlin

My team owned the carrier networks. We created an application to ingest data from many carriers and provide a standardized interface to our internal services. The data would include stations, lanes, operating times, and ancillary entities.

• Led a multi-team initiative to expand our last-mile network into an end-to-end network that included suppliers and middle-mile data, to improve cost calculation and delivery time estimates.
• Led an initiative that reduced database usage by 75%.
• Led six interactive sessions about software design and testing practices that led to improvements to the code base and a significant shift in developers' approach to testing.
• Contributed to creating a tool that empowered stakeholders to manage facility closures without the help of developers.
• Overhauled the daily work of my team to improve deliveries with better ceremonies, better use of epics, and shorter tickets.
• Led three Event Storming sessions to capture the supply chain domains.
• Participated in the hiring process: SQL, system design

HelloFresh・Staff Engineer | Apr. 2015–Sep. 2021 ・ Berlin

Rocket Internet sent me to HelloFresh for six months to support their rapid growth before they hired me. Within six years, I grew up from Senior Engineer to Chapter Lead, then Staff Engineer.

• Mentored five engineers to get started with Go, for three months each.
• Made over thirty presentations to improve the skills of the developers in my chapter.
• Led a multi-team, cross-functional initiative that improved the user experience with My Deliveries, the most visited screen at HelloFresh.
• Led an initiative to create the first auth filter at HelloFresh.
• Tricked my colleagues into doing domain-driven design with a fun game of naming things.
• Created the Chapter Days as an experiment for my chapter to pay its technical debt, which was quickly adopted by other chapters.
• Contributed to the redesign of the experimentation infrastructure.
• Led a multi-team, cross-functional initiative that reduced the menu size by 97% and the latency by 66%.
• Extracted services from the API monolith for recipes and menus.
• Appointed as the owner of the API monolith. Introduced better practices and did a lot of upgrades to reduce the burden of working with the code base.
• Enabled HelloFresh to open in Belgium with content in French and Dutch with minimal effort by creating a system that allowed entities to have multiple languages.
• Participated in the hiring process: technical screening

Rocket Internet・Senior Software Engineer | Dec. 2014–Mar. 2015 ・ Berlin

Backend development. I joined a team mid-project and helped deliver Vendito, a rival to OLX and Gumtree.

Monkees・Senior Software Engineer | Sep. 2012–Nov. 2014 ・ Berlin

Fullstack development on personal CMS and Drupal. Created a client for Salesforce's API. CI/CD with Jenkins and Travis-CI. Some references: 3SI, TransitionsPro, Réseau Mazda, Intermarché, Nutrikéo, and Pfizer.

Hima360・Software Engineer | Jul. 2009–Aug. 2012 ・ Toulouse

Backend development on personal CMS, Wordpress, and Drupal. Some references: Atalian, Berger-Levrault, Cancer-bio-santé, Compobaie, Curtina, Emailvision, Europa-organisation, Eurorégion, and Pole Star.

Orealys・Software Engineer | Mar. 2008–Jun. 2009 ・ Toulouse

Backend development. Modernization of the in-house CMS (Isens Evolution). Punctual trainer in French and English on the in-house CMS. Some references: Agronutrition, APEM, CCI Ariège, Lingari, and Sylob.

Freelance・Developer and Designer | 2006–Feb. 2008 ・ Toulouse

Design and Fullstack development. Some references: chilia.fr, cinqcinq.com, leventre.com, and sideralsante.fr.

Other experiences

Video editor. Short movies party organizer. Queer party organizer / DJ. Gave up on my bachelor in Psychology to become a developer.

Open-source contributions

Here are a few highlights of my open-source contributions. More on GitHub.

• Created a Composer plugin to collect PHP 8.0 attributes. Featured on JetBrains' PHP Annotated.
• Created a Multilingual Inflector, with over 1M downloads.
• Created an internationalization package that was used for a few years by Prestashop.
• Improved the sorting algorithm of Composer, the package manager for PHP.
• Created the framework ICanBoogie, for PHP.
• Created the UI framework Feelin, for AmigaOS and friends.