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Christophe Gillette
- Mountain View, California
Profile
- Hands-on Engineering Executive with over 20 years of experience in leading, planning, designing and developing mission critical and embedded software, many times from inception to production but also from large existing systems and code bases
- Experienced with modern software stacks, cloud-based SaaS platforms and architectures
- Experience ranging from browser internals, graphics, client and server side technologies, and a wide range of client application development (Windows, iOS, Android, Kindle to name a few)
- Managed and led large cross-functional and multi-location teams (Asia, South America, Eastern Europe) with over 160 reports
- Worked remotely for the last 6 years (partially at first, and fully for the last 3)
- Practiced and implemented Agile processes for the last 20 years
- Thrives on implementing simple solutions to complex problems at all levels: algorithmic, software design, and more importantly user experience. Over career, frequently called upon to uncover root causes of complex technical problems and solve them
- Corporate delegate to international working groups (co-author the SVG specification (W3C) as well as few JSRs (JCP))
Experience
Co-founder, VP of Engineering
July 2015-Present
Reva Technology
Los Altos, California
Reva offers a vertical SaaS CRM aimed at the multi-family industry, and intends to replace the current property management solutions that are ripe for disruption. Its goal is to bring best in class processes implemented in other industries to the real estate space.
Many property managers are using different software solutions to address their needs which often results in a disjoint experience, and an incomplete data representation of their business. On the other hand, Reva provides a cohesive, consistent and unmatched experience from lead generation to resident services.
The solution interacts with a large list of different actors ranging from consumers (prospective renters, residents) to enterprise users (leasing staff, resident services, marketing, accounting, maintenance, asset management, etc.) through a responsive web application and mobile applications (iOS and Android).
The software footprint is composed of a multi-channel communication platform, a call center, a scheduling system, rental application screening, a work manager (automatic task creation and assignment to teams and team members), digital contracts, payments, websites and consumer self-serve flows, pricing, search, syncing with legacy systems, etc. In addition, the analytics framework is tailored to drive effective business decisions at the marketing level (ROI tracking by source, ILS syndication, etc.) and at the property management level (asset usage tracking and optimizations, sales fennel optimizations, agent behavior tracking, executive portfolio reports and alerts, etc.).
Managing all engineering functions of the company with the support of engineers distributed across several geographic regions: California, Romania, Costa Rica and Peru. Responsible for strategic planning of our software intiatives and in constant communication with other groups: executive, product, UX, sales and customer service teams. Self-sufficient enough to be able to investigate and fix the majority of issues that could arise on the production system.
- Defined, implemented and enforced processes to support an engineering team that quickly reached 30-35 members. Provided the ability to run different services on local machines through VPN including communications.
- Oversaw the release management of bi-monthly feature pushes to production.
- Organized quality control through lint, static code analysis, unit tests, integration tests, end-to-end automated testing and manual testing.
- Performed hands-on management and led by example (PR reviews, mentoring, debugging, investigating staging or prod issues, etc.)
- Drove the adoption of monitoring practices that allowed to detect and pro-actively fix problems (address potential bottlenecks, release push regressions, system health, etc.).
- Participated and guided architecture choices.
- Enforced an emphasis on "no downtime" for customer operations (release deployments, new website, system upgrades, legacy system changes, etc.)
Tools: AWS, Docker, NodeJS, React, React Native, Mobx, Redux, Testcafe, Expo, ELK, ElastAlert, Aurora, Postgres, RabbitMQ, Snowflake, Sisense, etc.
Head of Engineering, Intel Education
Apr 2015-July 2015
Head of Software Engineering, Intel Education
Nov 2013-July 2015
Intel
Santa Clara, California
Education is currently experiencing a rapid transformation towards personalized learning. A number of factors such as increased competition, new initiatives, lower costs, better adapted form factors for K-12, digitized content, and new software solutions suggest that the transformation is well under way. Intel Education is actively participating in this transition and has chosen to improve education by providing the educators with actionable data about the student, tailored content, better communication tools, and adapted hardware.
Led a global team (US, Romania, China and India) of over 150 hardware and software engineers delivering the Intel Education (IEG)
product portfolio reporting to the VP - General Manager Intel Education. Oversaw hardware engineering, software engineering, IT/Operations (internal and external deployments), and hardware/software validation teams.
The hardware and system teams prototyped, productized, and worked closely with ODMs and OEMs to deliver purposed built hardware (2-in-1s, laptops, tablets, etc.) for the worldwide education market
supporting Windows, Android and Linux distributions. In addition, they provided our unique security and protection solutions highly regarded by many Ministries of Education.
The software team focused on delivering SaaS solutions that improved teacher-student interactions, on developing applications that helped create, distribute, consume content or assessments,
and on collecting analytics that provided insight for the student, teacher, district and Ministry.
The IT/Ops team managed all hardware, software license and network infrastructure as well as external deployment of our cloud.
The validation team ensured quality of all the products developed internally, and proper integration of partner software developers.
- Led the engineering effort on both hardware and software for a critical deal (1M tablets) for Intel and its partners in an extremely tight schedule. Represented Intel on daily meetings with the customer, the OS developer, driver developers, the ODM, etc. and was instrumental in issue resolutions that concluded to a successful deployment.
- Organized teams as self-sufficient and multi-disciplinary teams assigned to a project or feature, allowing the handling of most decisions at the team level. Optimized by assigning members based on their interests (TOP model).
- Handled resource, priorities and budget planning for the engineering group in coordination with the UX and PM leadership, and improved relationship and processes with finance.
- Managed deployment of cloud at customer locations including decision on infrastructure to use and timing.
- Closely monitored releases and provided technical input when applicable to the different projects that my teams worked on.
- Implemented a very flexible and versatile organization for the client team where most engineers could work on different OS (Android, Windows, iOS).
- Shortened the release cycle to improve the predictability of the release date, but also allow team members to change teams and project regularly.
- Broke down the yearly PORs into quarterly PORs in alignment with UX and PM, providing 2 quarters of visibility to the team.
- Increased visibility of the organization by publishing documents accessible to all IEG employees such as project statuses, quarterly PORs, list of potential deployments, etc.
- Created rotating SWAT teams to work on production issues and on advanced projects/prototypes.
- Kicked off the re-design of the analytics pipeline based on Big Data technologies.
- Participated to the Harvard Business management multi-month training offered by Intel.
Director of Engineering
Apr 2010-Nov 2013
Kno - Acquired by Intel in November 2013
Santa Clara, California
Kno first applied its vision for Education by developing in a matter of months a new type of tablet along with a full software stack tailored to the education market as well as a bookstore. After licensing its hardware design to Intel, it focused on developing software "to make learning engaging, effective and social to students", for both the college and K-12 market.
Reported to CTO and organized work for up to 15 people assigned to different projects. Interacted and influenced different teams
(PM, QA, PMO, UE, IT, Ops, architecture, release, etc.). Managed and collaborated with teams in California, Pakistan, Peru, Costa Rica and Romania.
Referred some key leadership hires.
Consistently assigned to high value, challenging and deadline driven projects (and most often assigned to 1.0 products):
the pen and graphics performance (including HW acceleration),
the secured OTA software update, the transition to iPad development (which became a top Education app), the html5 web reader (from ingestion to delivery),
critical pilots, the delivery of a Metro style app in time for the Windows 8 launch, the transition to a common code base for sharing the business logic between all our apps, etc.
Spearheaded the development of all the apps (responsibilities changing over time) and eventually took over the management of all of the Kno apps (iPad, Android, Windows store and Windows desktop apps).
The apps allow to read offline DRM protected books, collect highlights, notes, etc. into a journal, augment the book content with Smartlinks (video, audio, 3D, etc.) and quizzes,
synchronize data across devices, collect statistics to provide a loop back to the student and educator, subscribe to the UGC of other users, add personal PDF files, etc.
- Initiated the Xamarin investigation as a cross-platform solution, got the buy-in from executive management and directed the development of the common platform code, and the apps based on it (iPad, Android, Windows store and desktop apps).
- Managed all C/C++ common components across the apps: DRM, page rendering, highlights, quizme, search, etc.
- Delivered in record time a complete solution for an html5 web reader with 30000 books available at launch and others converted on demand (includes REST apis, single session management, hardware, front end, CDN with token protection)
- Managed the transition from the Kno device apps (reader and content manager) to the iPad app which became shortly after the top 4 grossing application
- Supervised local reports, contractors and teams in remote location
- Made significant improvements to the framework and rendering pipeline when working on the Kno device, and made significant performance improvements to the reader as well (for example, worked with vendor to optimize a page rendering from 47s to 2.6s).
- Managed the ingestion team responsible for taking publisher’s PDF files and optimizing them for the on-device experience.
- Organized the localization and I18N across the apps including Arabic.
- Championed, implemented and maintained continuous integration builds, automated testing and review systems.
- Interacted with various vendors (Artifex, Nvidia, Intertrust (DRM), Xamarin, etc.).
- Successfully retained engineers during uncertainties before and after the acquisition.
- Implemented the build systems for windows, iOS and android apps with easy download of the artifacts built for different environments.
Tools: Xcode, Visual Studio, Xamarin, HTML5, CSS, Javascript, C#, ObjectiveC, Java, C/C++, Linux, MacOS, Windows, Bamboo, Jira, Rally, Crucible/Fisheye, Bamboo, Jenkins, scripting, Jetty, nginx, Apache, profilers, REST, CEF, etc.
CTO, Co-founder & StartX Alumnus
Jan 2012-Jun 2012
Kidaptive
Los Altos, California
Kidaptive is an innovative education and technology company dedicated to smart story telling on tablets. The teaching curriculum is integrated in the app through a list of games embedded in each appisode. The game difficulty is tailored to the child's level. Parents can monitor the progress of their children and receive advice based on the findings gathered from usage analytics.
Participated to the efforts that led to Series A financing.
- Co-authored slide deck and participated in some of the VC meetings.
- Participated in the StartX (Stanford Accelerator) spring session.
- Prepared and updated the app (Appisode 1) for sharing with eventual investors (Apple registration, distribution, etc.) and participated to user studies.
- Created and set-up the web site.
- Planned budget and worked on the resource selection.
Tools: AWS, ObjectiveC
Senior Software Engineer
Jan 2009-Apr 2010
Lab126, an Amazon.com company
Cupertino, California
Lab126 is the development company that designs and engineers high-profile Amazon's devices such as the Kindle family of products.
Joined a newly formed browser team responsible for porting and integrating WebKit to the eInk Kindle platform.
- Co-integrated WebKit into the platform code as a client-server module to keep the UI independent from the browser engine.
- Improved network connections and loading times by patching open source software.
- Optimized and tailored rendering to the unique requirements of eInk displays.
- Designed and implemented user interactions with the web content and page navigation only using directional keys. A user could successfully navigate through dynamic content (controlled by Javascript), through embedded iframes and through complex UIs such as Google maps. Reviewed by Jeff Bezos.
- Engaged in architectural discussions about the upcoming Kindle generation.
- Created a prototype and presented to VP to demonstrate the strengths of a platform designed around the browser (before WebOS and ChromeOS were announced).
Tools: WebKit, Gtk+, DirectFB, eInk, Linux, Java
Engineering Manager & Software Architect
Jun 2007-Jan 2009
Vusion
Milpitas, California
Vusion provided an advanced end-to-end video streaming service featuring instant-on, high definition video experience over broadband internet, and served customers such as the National Geographic Channel, Nova and Universal Music. The complete system included streaming servers, administration servers, web servers, P2P technology, video browser plug-ins, an advertisement platform and the video management system (playlist, video encoding, etc.).
Joined as one of the first engineers and managed/architected all aspects of the product related to web technologies including the web services.
- Video Management System manager
- Defined requirements, visuals and interactions across the application including the content management console and the analytics dashboard, and developed webcasts as part of the help system.
- Created an event-driven architecture built around reusable/embeddable components using OO Javascript to support video uploading (http/ftp), video metadata edition, static and smart playlist creation, advertisement policies, comprehensive customer and internal analytics (including billing), user registration and management (groups), customer management, etc.
- Product acclaimed by customers as very intuitive and powerful compared to alternatives. Stratton Sclavos praised the UI simplicity and the speed of development.
- Player SDK manager
- Designed a highly customizable, event-driven and object-oriented JavaScript/ActionScript3 SDK composed of plugable components.
- By adding a couple of lines to their web sites, customers had access to powerful features such as automated plug-in installation/upgrade, ad integration with several ad networks and ad management (pre/mid/post roll and companion ads), analytics collection, first/last frame customizations, multi video format support, multiplayer support on a single web page, playlist support (JSON/RSS), multilingual support (all demonstrated in a showcase with sample code).
- Software release management
- Automatic documentation generation (web services, player SDK) and webcast creation
- Schema validation tool and patch management across environments, deployment scripts, performance monitoring, obfuscation, static code analysis.
Tools: LAMP, nginx, Python, Javascript, HTML, ExtJS, Sencha, REST web services, Graphs toolkit, JSLint, Google toolkit, Flash, Linux
Principal Engineer/Architect
Feb 2005-Jun 2007
Motorola, Mobile Devices
Sunnyvale, California
Co-architected a new declarative UI framework that defined the application layer with its behaviors and data bindings (observers), and created an innovative widget framework that empowered designers to develop rich graphical experiences, creative layouts and transitions, and deploy to the targeted hardware in a matter of seconds. This UI framework significantly improved the user experience, quality and time-to-market while simplifying customizations. It worked from low-end to high-end devices thanks to the careful usage of memory and performance optimizations It shipped on a number of Motorola devices including the ROKR E8 and the MOTO U9.
- Mobile UI framework lead
- Managed, architected and led the development of the SVG widget framework across different locations.
- Augmented SVG of features more specific to UIs such as dynamic layouts, localization, I18N and the support for right-to-left languages.
- Co-designed the application framework including packaging, cascading skins, etc.
- Managed remote teams who helped develop and test the framework, and converted some of the main applications.
- Trained and helped the different teams (framework, apps and design teams) to effectively interact with each other. The new architecture introduced a paradigm shift in terms of how the respective teams used to work together.
- Embedded graphics and UI expert
- Corporate delegate to international consortiums including W3C (SVG) and JCP (JSR226, JSR290).
- Conducted corporate-wide technical presentations to encourage the use of declarative technologies for creating rich and animated UIs, and to promote the idea that designers should be able to iterate their designs on the actual devices with instant feedback.
Tools: XML, CSS, Javascript, C/C++, SVG, scripting, Valgrind, Linux
Project Manager/Technical Lead
Oct 2003-Feb 2005
Motorola, Mobile Devices
Sunnyvale, California
Architected and managed the Mobile Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) project from conception to deployment on Motorola’s Linux-Java product line. Just like HTML browsers, SVG browsers support DOM APIs (core, event model), JavaScript bindings, i18n, text wrapping, text edition, images, xml parsing, CSS, JavaScript, link walking/traversing, etc. In addition, they also support SMIL animations, text scaling and rotation, graphical shapes, matrix transformations, embedded fonts, transparency, gradients, video, audio, etc.
- Managed and co-implemented Motorola’s SVG player (including an implementation of JSR135 (SVG), JSR226 and Javascript bindings). Implementation highly optimized the memory usage, footprint and performance (benchmarked better than other 3rd party SVG engines).
- Led its integration into different applications (Start-up screen, browser, media player, Java bindings, home screen).
- Leveraged the SVG engine infrastructure to develop the MMS player (transitions, rendering, DOM, HTML rendering, parsing).
- Maintained highest standards of quality by automating regression tests, memory corruption tests, leak detection, unit test execution, code size monitoring, image correlation tests against a baseline (>1000 svg files), document generation and the display of these results on a web site. One of the tests checked the engine stability by failing one-by-one every memory allocation.
- Mentored dev, qa and release engineers on debugging skills, good practices and processes.
- Engine capabilities and its potential was demonstrated to the CTO: Padmasree Warrior.
Tools: SVG, XML, Java, SMIL, MMS, HTML, CSS, C/C++, Javascript, Qt, Linux, Valgrind, productivity tools
Additional Experience
Mentor
2021
StartX, Stanford Student Start-up Accelerator
Mountain View, California
Principal Consultant
2009-2010
CGI Consulting
Sunnyvale, California
Co-founder, Chief Architect
2006-2007
LiveConnex
Redwood City, California
President (Volunteer)
2000-2003
Georgian Bay Sailing Centre
Ottawa, Canada
Senior Software Engineer
2000-2003
BitFlash
Ottawa, Canada
Software Engineer
1998-1999
Gallium Software
Ottawa, Canada
Software Engineer
1997-2000
Nav Canada (Canadian FAA)
Ottawa, Canada
Network Administrator
1997
Mediterranean Shipping Company
Le Havre, France
Operational Administrator
1996
French Air Force
Paris, France
Software Analyst (Internship)
1996
Transport Canada Aviation
Ottawa, Canada
Software Developer
1995
Research Center of French Civil Aviation Administration
Toulouse, France
Software Researcher
1993-1994
French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control (INRIA)
Grenoble, France
Patents
Education & Awards
ScrumMaster Certification
2014
StartX, Stanford Student Start-up Accelerator
2012
Followed StartX spring session as part of the Kidaptive team
Palo Alto, California
Motorola Inc.
Awards in recognition of technical leadership and contributions to engineering training
M.Sc. Computer Science and Aeronautics, summa cum laude
1996
Ecole Nationale de l'Aviation Civile
Toulouse, France
Recipient of the Best Masters Thesis Award from the City of Toulouse
B.Sc. Computer Science, summa cum laude
1994
University of Mathematics Joseph Fourier
Grenoble, France
Enrolled in an extra-curricular education program followed by merit students (Magistère)
References
Please refer to the recommendations on my LinkedIn profile