A new chapter at Dougs

Building reliable backends
from south-west France.

Software Engineer at Dougs since August 2026, after six years at Stiilt. I design backend systems that hold up in production with TypeScript, NestJS and PostgreSQL: queues, retries, idempotency, observability and business-critical integrations.

Read about me → Get in touch

Experience

6 yrs

Stack

TS · NestJS

Location

43.7° N · Gers

Status

● At Dougs

About

A backend engineer at home in two languages and two countries.

I grew up in the UK and now live in the Gers, in south-west France. I have worked fully remote for the last three years.

I joined Dougs as a Software Engineer in August 2026 after six years at Stiilt, where I started as a junior developer in 2020 and became technical lead in 2023. My experience spans distributed backend systems: multi-tenant SaaS platforms, queues and workers, external integrations, and services that need to stay reliable in production.

Outside of work I run a small homelab, photograph the night sky with my own telescope setup, and play music, badly but with enthusiasm.

Work

Now at Dougs, after six years building backends at Stiilt.

Dougs

Software Engineer

August 2026 - present

Stiilt

Senior Full Stack Developer, Backend & Architecture

2020-2026

FPS Navigator

B2B SaaS · shipped

Automated parking-fine management platform integrated with France's national traffic authority (ANTAI), on a multi-tenant architecture.

Designed an OCR + AI pipeline, cutting per-fine processing from ~15 min to ~30 sec.
Built a distributed BullMQ / Redis architecture with queues, retry policies and monitoring, scaled for ~35,000 fines/day.
Developed a secured partner API: API keys, payload validation, request signing, fine upload.
Implemented payment, notification and recharging workflows in a multi-tenant environment.

Neo-leasing platform

B2B2C platform · shipped

Web and mobile vehicle-leasing application covering the full customer lifecycle: subscription, contract, inspection, vehicle access and fleet tracking.

Migrated a legacy .NET backend to NestJS / TypeORM / PostgreSQL.
Built modules for contracts, digital inspection reports, automated KYC and multi-channel payments.
Near real-time telemetry for ~200 vehicles via a standalone WebSocket relay on Kubernetes.
Integrated virtual key access via the Continental SDK and NFC.

Technical lead

From 2023

Set backend standards across the company and supported the team as it grew.

Defined NestJS module structure, API conventions, error handling and data validation.
Code reviews and mentoring for junior developers and interns.
Led technical scoping and architecture decisions for new features and migrations.
Authored French R&D tax credit (CIR/CII) filings covering technical innovation.

Stack

What I reach for.

Backend

TypeScript
NestJS
Node.js
PostgreSQL
TypeORM
BullMQ / Redis
REST API design

Frontend

Angular
React
TypeScript

Infrastructure

Kubernetes (GKE)
Docker
Helm
CI/CD

Architecture

Multi-tenant SaaS
Standalone services
Workers / queues
Event-driven
Distributed systems

Methods

Technical specification
Code review
Quality standards
Agile

Homelab

A small rack in the corner of the office.

Self-hosting is how I learn ops on hardware I own. The setup grows and shrinks; this is a peek at what's running today.

// things move around a lot; read the latest State of the Lab here

rack-01.degaujac.lan online ●

U1 Compute N100 Proxmox host · bare-metal Ubuntu server

U2 Storage UniFi UNAS Pro · 20 TB · RAID 6

U3 Networking UDM Pro · 4G backup · Headscale

U4 AI Qwen 3.8 27B · vLLM

U5 Services Immich · Vaultwarden · Technitium · Traefik · Gitea

U6 Observability Prometheus + Grafana · Loki · Alloy

Sky

Photographs of things very far away.

The sky around my home in the Gers is around Bortle 3. I photograph deep-sky objects with a small refractor on a tracking mount, then stack the frames in PixInsight. It is slow, precise work, with a very different rhythm from software.

Writing

Notes on backends, the sky, and the rack in the corner.

Oct 2026 // astrophoto

A Squid, a Bat, and the Last of My Patience

Sh2-129 and Ou4: 43 hours and 35 minutes across fifteen nights, one very faint squid, and a suspiciously sudden interest in monochrome cameras.

6 MIN READ

Sept 2026 // homelab

DocuForge: Making the Pipeline Reliable

What came after the robot arm: missing prompt instructions, overenthusiastic tags, and the less glamorous work of making a local AI document pipeline reliable.

7 MIN READ

Jun 2026 // hardware