Sylvain Artois
Fractional CTO · AFK.live founder
Building for the web since 2001. Over two decades in the software
industry, with hands-on experience at Etsy,
Chanel, and several startups.
My focus sits at the intersection
of software engineering, ML/AI, and technical leadership.
As a hands-on CTO, I build collaborative teams, ship products that matter, and keep engineering culture healthy under pressure.
What I'm Building
Kairos.ing
Part-time CTO for startups and scale-ups who need senior technical leadership — architecture, hiring, security, delivery — without a full-time executive hire. Grounded in 20 years of hands-on engineering, from Etsy to early-stage ventures.
AFK.live
An independent news platform built to support field journalism and break algorithmic echo chambers. Over 200 French and international sources, curated with AI-assisted editorial tools. Privacy-first, no tracking. The signal, not the noise.
Journal
A literary blog in French — editorials, poetry, moods, and reflections on the world and life.
Get in Touch
Have a project in mind or want to chat? Drop me a line.
Key Experience
2025 – Present
Kairos.ing — Founder
Fractional CTO practice for startups and scale-ups. Architecture, recruitment, delivery — 3 to 4 days a week embedded in client teams. First client: Wispra, an AI-powered GEO platform optimizing visibility on AI engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude).
2025 – Present
AFK.live — Founder
News aggregation platform analyzing and curating headlines from 240+ French media sources. Features topic-based dossiers, press reviews, and near real-time event tracking with an editorial lens.
2024 – 2025
Harvy — CTO & Partner
Startup in short-supply-chain agriculture. Designed the full software architecture for a producer group pooling and local e-commerce platform. Product management, recruitment and management of a small developer team.
2020 – 2023
Lemon Learning — CTO
Led the industrialization of a SaaS product: cloud migration to Terraform-managed Azure, CI/CD pipelines, Docker dev environments, monorepo migration. Grew the engineering team from 4 to 12 and drove ISO 27001 preparation.
2019 – 2020
Chanel — Consultant (Robert Walters)
SRE team. Designed and developed an internal monitoring indicator aggregation API. Operations: alerting, dashboarding, and mobilizing stakeholders organized in silos.
2014 – 2017
Etsy — Senior Developer
Redesigned the catalog search interface with a full JS/Redux migration. Built an internal link-building SEO interface. Contributed to AWS cloud migration and continuous deployment.