James Lafa

Head of Engineering - Workflows

Personio

Jun 2022 - Current (4 years 3 months)

I spent four years at Back building software to create a better workplace by removing administrative hurdles, facilitating employee communication and automating internal processes. After Personio acquired Back, I joined the company as Head of Engineering to keep working on that same mission leveraging their fantastic platform, people and culture. I'm leading the engineering effort of the workflow domain. Together we are building the next generation of People Workflow Automation. Do you want to join us? Check our open position at https://www.personio.com/careers/.

CTO & Co-Founder

Back

May 2018 - May 2022 (4 years 1 month)

We're building the world's first automation platform to scale your People Operations. Integrated with Slack, Teams and your existing core systems to provide a great employee experience at scale. Back, the software and the entire team were acquired by Personio in May 2022.

Entrepreneur

Entrepreneur First

Apr 2018 - May 2018 (2 months)

At Entrepreneur First, I worked on creating a communication coach using Artificial Intelligence to give instant feedback to sales team while speaking to clients. Most of the companies investing in communication training offer a 2-3 days training a year to their team. These trainings are expensive, difficult to organise and offer poor results because the employee do not get future feedbacks and rapidly forget what he learnt.

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Research Fellow

Hackmindai

Feb 2018 - Apr 2018 (3 months)

At Hackmind we research and build products on the most exciting topics: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Blockchain and Robotics. I develop several products using Deep Learning (Tensorflow / Keras), Computer Vision (OpenCV), Deep Reinforcement Learning to teach a computer how to play simple video games (pure Python) and some robotics/IOT with Raspberry Pi and Arduino. It is an exciting time where I have the occasion to work on lots of very interesting projects and apply my machine learning knowledge at high pace!

CTO and Co-founder

Dentolo

Nov 2015 - Mar 2017 (1 year 5 months)

I co-founded Dentolo and worked as CTO. The company was acquired by Zurich insurances in 2019. I designed, built and deployed our current architecture and applications: - Dentolo's website (http://www.dentolo.de); - Dentolo's backend used by the operation's team; - Dentolo's dentist backend used by dentists of our network. The application is based on the following stack: - Ruby on Rails; - PostgreSQL; - Redis/sidekiq as QMS. The application features are: - sending emails and SMS; - geocoding request, calculating distances clients/dentists; - internationalization; - building its own analytic (visits, marketing, revenues, etc.). Continuous deployment: - each commit is automatically tested and deployed on production without hum

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CTO

Minodes

Jul 2014 - Dec 2015 (1 year 6 months)

As CTO at Minodes, I lead the development and research team of the company. The company raised 7,550,000 € and got acquired in May 2017 by Telefónica NEXT for an undisclosed amount. Together, we design and build new applications and services capable of processing the huge amounts of data we’re receiving every day to offer insightful analyses to our clients: - how long do people spend time in the shop - how often are they coming back - how do they move inside the store (or the commercial center) how many clients are visiting - find the busiest area of the shop - find relationships between stores in a commercial center, etc. One of our main technical challenges was to build a new data processing architecture that’s very scalable

Frontend Developer

Pipe

Oct 2013 - Jun 2014 (9 months)

Pipe is a file transfer Facebook application. With a simple drag-and-drop, you can send files without any file size limit to any of your Facebook contact. As a Frontend Developer, I rewrote from scratch the entire application, initially developed with Flash, with Javascript using the framework AngularJS. I also designed and developed the new file transfer engine based on WebRTC. Pipe was one of the first application allowing to transfer files via WebRTC between Firefox and Chrome. The startup, unfortunately, stopped the activity and it’s not possible to use the application anymore. The new application was mentioned multiple times in the press: - https://gigaom.com/2014/02/03/pipe-turns-to-webrtc-for-in-facebook-file-transfer-tech/ -

CEO

AngryKatze

Jun 2013 - Jul 2014 (1 year 2 months)

Design and development of web applications : - backend : Ruby on Rails - frontend : AngularJS, D3.js (data visualisations) - other : WebRTC (data transfer) Since octobre 2013, I develop, for a Berlin based startup, a Peer to Peer file transfer web application. This Facebook application is developed with AngularJS. File transfer is developed using WebRTC technology.

Design and implementation of a network scanner on a large scale

freelance

Jan 2013 - May 2013 (5 months)

Creation of a large-scale network scanner to have detailed information on every devices connected to a network. This network can be as big as a country like France (13 millions of IP). Used technologies: - Python 3 - MongoDB - AngularJS - Celery + RabbitMQ Architecture: Distributed architecture with RabbitMQ and Celery allowing task distribution on a set of scanners spread across the world to scale easily. Scanners: Based on an modular architecture developed in Python to be able to add plugins which can be activated to search for specific data on the network (open ports detection, recovery banner SSH or SSL, etc..). All data is stored in a MongoDB database. The control and reporting interface of the scanner is a weba

WebApp Developer - Backend and Frontend

OWNIfr

Jan 2011 - Oct 2012 (1 year 10 months)

WebApp application development : - Node.js : ['MongoDB', 'Express.js', 'Jade', 'Stylus'] - HTML5 : ['WebStorage', 'FileApi', 'Audio', 'Video', 'Forms'] - CSS3 : ['Transitions', 'Transformations', 'Animations', ’Selectors'] - jQuery : ['Ajax', 'DOM/CSS Manipulation', 'DOM Traversing'] - PHP : ['PHP POO', 'MySQL'] - Facebook : ['Graph API', 'FB Dialogs', 'FQL'] => but I would rather never have to use it again Examples of projects : - Web Documentary : Mémoire d'Algérie ['Node.js', 'MongoDB', 'Express.js', 'Jade/Stylus'] http://memoires-algerie.org/ - OpenData Quizz for OrangeLabs : Où habitez-vous vraiment ? ['PHP POO', 'MySQL', 'CSS3', 'jQuery'] http://app.owni.fr/ou-habitez-vous-vraiment/ - Media website : OWNI ['Wordpress', 'CSS

Testing team manager at GDF Suez

Accenture Technology Solutions

Mar 2009 - Dec 2010 (1 year 10 months)

Manage a team of 15 members with the responsibility to test infrastructure and programs before production deployment. 30% of the team was offshore in Mauritius. - Manage test campaign schedule, keep the agenda, task assignment and budget monitoring. - Handle customer relationship being the first contact of customer managers. - Lead the standardization and optimization of all our processes and deliverables.

HR Access <-> SAP HR interfaces development for Disneyland Paris

Accenture Technology Solutions

Nov 2008 - Mar 2009 (5 months)

Build HR Access <-> SAP HR interfaces : - Design interfaces - Build interfaces in ABAP - Work on parameterization of Personnal Administration and Organisation Management modules Technologies: SAP, ABAP

Development Team Leader for EDF

Accenture Technology Solutions

Jun 2007 - Nov 2008 (1 year 6 months)

Specify, design and build new Human Ressources Portal of EDF (more than 100 000 agents). Worked as Team Leader of a 5 developers team : team management, daily report to the client, team scheduling, code revue, etc. Technologies : - JAVA/J2EE : EJB - SOA : Webservices - IHM : STRUTS et SWT

J2EE Developer for Banque Populaire

Accenture Technology Solutions

Aug 2004 - May 2007 (2 years 10 months)

Full rebuild of the distribution system of credits. Lead the publishing team : - validate and deploy the publishing framework - model and develop data containers - guarantee weekly delivery and deployment quality - schedule and monitor team activity Develop business components : - EJB development - maintain unit tests Technologies : - JAVA/J2EE : EJB - SOA webservices - STRUTS/SWT

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