Sylvain Artois
Technical Manager freelance
Doing things with code — And maybe a few neurons
About
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 CTO and Technical Manager, I build collaborative teams, ship products that matter, and keep engineering culture healthy under pressure.
Management & Leadership
Languages & Frameworks
Data & AI
Infra & DevOps
Side Quests for Junior Developers — A Lightweight Path to Growth
BERTopic Hyperparameter Tuning: Building a Speed-Optimized Grid Search System
Mental Health Management in a Remote Team, A Personal Experience
NLP supervised clustering evaluation, back to basics
Building a SetFit Dataset: The Taxonomy
Key Experience
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 two-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.
Kairos.io
Crisis Management for Software Projects
Too many tech projects derail — not from lack of talent, but from accumulated poor decisions, both human and technical. Deadlines explode, budgets evaporate, velocity drops to zero.
Kairos.io provides targeted intervention at the crossroads of management and engineering: unblocking projects that have stalled, with sharp analysis and experience making hard calls under pressure. Think of it as CTO advisory — the voice that whispers to the CTO when no one else has the mandate to state the diagnosis.
That's why I founded Kairos.io — driven by an entrepreneurial impulse and the conviction that sometimes you need an outside perspective to see what's been right in front of you all along.
Get in Touch
Have a project in mind or want to chat? Drop me a line.
Side Projects
AFK.live
A news aggregator that curates headlines from 200+ French and international press sources — offering thematic AI-enriched dossiers, topic tracking, and a curated daily digest. The signal, not the noise.
Journal
A literary blog in French — editorials, poetry, moods, and reflections on the world and life.