Jean-François Lépine

I help teams design resilient systems, shorten lead time, and ship with confidence. I combine hands-on architecture with pragmatic DevOps and a metrics-driven culture.

Jean-François Lépine

Principal Engineer & CTO focused on reliability, scale, and developer productivity

Systems design SRE & Reliability Platform & DX Data & Observability Go • PHP • JavaScript • Bash AWS • Unix

My expertise

High-leverage work areas aligned with Big Tech expectations. Evidence-based, measurable outcomes.

Architecture for Scale

Design modular, evolvable systems: hexagonal boundaries, contracts, and safe migrations. Plan capacity, SLIs/SLOs, sharding, queues, backpressure, idempotency.

  • Reduced p99 latency with caching tiers and async pipelines
  • Cut infra spend via workload-aware autoscaling and storage choices

Reliability & SRE

SLOs, error budgets, incident response, and postmortems that improve recovery and prevent repeats. Defense in depth across CI/CD, rollout, and runtime.

  • Blue/green, canary, and feature flags with fast rollback
  • Runbooks, chaos drills, and DR tested regularly

Data & Observability

Metrics, logs, traces, and event streams for product and platform telemetry. ClickHouse, OpenTelemetry.

  • Actionable dashboards tied to SLOs and business KPIs
  • Tracing driven performance and cost optimization

Platform & Developer Experience

Internal platforms that reduce cognitive load: golden paths, paved roads, templates, and guardrails.

  • Minutes-to-prod CI/CD with policy-as-code
  • Automated quality gates and architecture fitness functions

Application Security

Threat modeling, supply-chain trust, secrets hygiene, and least privilege by default.

  • SLSA-style provenance, dependency health
  • Runtime policies and anomaly detection

Leadership & Coaching

Clear ownership, pragmatic rituals, and growth paths. I align technical strategy with measurable outcomes.

  • Hiring rubrics and bar-raising interviews
  • Design reviews and RCA culture that sticks

Open Source Highlights

I actively contribute to open source. My projects are used by thousands of developers, from individual contributors to large engineering teams.

Main publications and conferences

I regularly give talks at international conferences and contribute books and podcasts on software engineering. Below is a complete list of my key contributions.

DateEventTalk / PublicationLinks
Feb 2025📽️ AFUPMassive survey on the PHP ecosystem
Sep 2023📔 EyrollesSoftware Quality for Backend DevelopersBuy
Aug 2023🎙️ PodcastImproving collaboration between testers and developersListen
Jun 2023📽️ Station FArtificial Intelligence: Opportunities and ThreatsVideo
May 2022📽️ Forum PHPWhat a full production crash taught usVideo
May 2021📽️ AFUP DaysFrom legacy to modern stacks (and back)Slides
Nov 2017📽️ Forum PHPShould we always strive for software quality?Slides
May 2017📽️ PHP TourStatic analysis? I know it… but I don’t get it!Slides
Nov 2014📽️ Blend Web MixDesigning domain-driven architecturesSlides
Jul 2014📽️ RMLLTesting a web application: tools and practicesSlides, Video
May 2014📽️ Solution LinuxPanel: Evolution of best practices in web development
Mar 2014📽️ Radio France / AFUPExperience report: when business needs drive architectureSlides, Video
Feb 2014📽️ Meetup Alter WayFront-end industrialization: introductionSlides
Nov 2013📽️ Meetup Alter WaySymfony2: a Domain Driven Design oriented framework?Slides
Oct 2013📽️ Open World ForumDeveloping a functionally complex projectSlides
Jun 2013📽️ Meetup Alter WayMutation TestingSlides
May 2013📽️ Solution LinuxIntroduction to Behavior Driven Development with BehatSlides
Feb 2013📽️ AFUP MeetupIndustrializing contracts in PHPSlides
Jul 2012📽️ AFUP MeetupExploiting PHP 5Slides
Jun 2012📔 EyrollesIndustrializing PHP 5: tools and best practicesBook
Feb 2012📽️ AFUP MeetupOOP and Traits in PHP 5.4Slides
LinkedIn

Contact me

I'm always open to new opportunities and collaborations. Contact me on LinkedIn