IT Architect & Fractional CTO — 20 years building technology that serves the business
I’ve spent twenty years doing one thing: helping organizations understand what their technology is actually doing to them.
Not for them. To them.
Most of the companies I’ve worked with weren’t looking for innovation. They were looking for clarity. They had systems that had grown faster than their understanding of those systems — and somewhere along the way, the technology had stopped serving the business and started shaping it. Sometimes constraining it. Sometimes holding it hostage.
”I don’t do architecture for its own sake. I never have.”
I started Exxan France in 2006 with no funding, no roadmap, and a genuine belief that good architecture could be a business advantage — not just a technical nicety. Nine years later, we were twelve people, close to $700K in revenue, with clients like L’Oréal, Thales, Safran, and Peugeot. I learned more in those nine years than in everything before or since. Mostly about failure. About what happens when you build for elegance instead of for the people who actually use the thing.
At Alter&Go — later acquired by Mazars — I redesigned their core ERP three times as the company grew. PHP to Symfony to full CQRS/DDD. By the time the acquisition closed, that system was on the term sheet as a strategic asset. I’m still proud of that.
At NS (Dutch Railways), I’m leading the most complex architectural challenge of my career: replacing a 30-year-old railway planning system that has become, over three decades, genuinely inseparable from the operational knowledge of the organization. The code isn’t just technical debt. It’s institutional memory. The question isn’t how to rewrite it — it’s how to rewrite it without losing what it knows.
I’m French, I’ve lived in the Netherlands for years, and I work in five languages across Benelux, western Germany, and northern France. I think better in French. I work better in the room.
I’m a single dad. That’s not a footnote — it’s probably the thing that taught me the most about prioritization, about what actually matters, and about showing up consistently even when it’s inconvenient.
Not the other way around. Every architectural decision I make has to answer to a business outcome. If it doesn't, we shouldn't be making it.
I'll tell you what I actually see — not what you want to hear. That sometimes makes for difficult conversations. That's the point.
Some decisions can't be made over Zoom. I believe in showing up — to the whiteboard session, the management meeting, the difficult conversation with the team lead.
I work with a small number of clients at any given time. That means I know your context, your constraints, and your history — not just the slide deck.
Leading monolith → cloud microservices transition. CQRS + Event Sourcing at scale.
Scalable solutions, CQRS & DDD, cross-functional team leadership.
Payment architecture for SaaS products. Amsterdam.
SaaS implementation for major grocery chains: ASDA, Morrisons, Salling (Tampa / Remote).
Full ERP redesign across 3 versions (PHP → Symfony → CQRS/DDD). Strategic asset at acquisition.
Built from 0 to 12 people, $0 to $700K revenue. Clients: L'Oréal, Thales, Peugeot, Safran, Mazars, DCNS.
30-minute call. No pitch. Just a conversation to see if we're a fit.