Valentin Hervieu

Passionate Product Engineer

Valentin Hervieu

Hi πŸ‘‹

I'm Valentin, a Product Engineer with 12+ years of experience working to build the right things right.

My work sits at the intersection of product craft, TypeScript/React, AI systems, and pragmatic architecture. I care about the full product loop: taking ambiguous ideas and turning them into fast, polished software, handling everything from data models and UI details to production rollouts and analytics.

I also maintain open-source projects used by thousands of developers, including React/Svelte components and developer tooling. You can find my projects on GitHub and more background on LinkedIn.

Projects

A React component library to crop images with easy interactions. I've started to implement this component at work for the listing form of Ricardo.ch.
Then, I thought it was a nice project and I decided to continue working on it on my personal time and made it open-source with the agreement of my employer.
Today, it has been downloaded near 100 million times on NPM.

Work experience

  1. Founding Engineer
    Current
    elba
    January 2022 – Present
    Remote from France

    Founding engineer in a small product team building Elba's B2B security SaaS from early foundations to a production-grade platform.

    Worked as a product engineer across TypeScript, React, Next.js, GraphQL, PostgreSQL, Inngest, analytics, observability, and AI-assisted product features. Owned complex product areas from ambiguous problem framing to polished UI, rollout, monitoring, and long-term maintenance.

    Most active contributor to the codebase, with 2 500+ commits and 3 600+ PR reviews across product, architecture, reliability, observability, and developer experience.

    Selected work:

    - Built a training editor with AI-assisted generation, translation, quizzes, localized previews, and multi-channel rendering across web, Slack, Teams, and Google Chat.

    - Built an AI-assisted phishing scenario editor with prompt-based generation, translation, real-time previews, validation, image handling, and polished editing flows.

    - Built a visual security automation editor for trigger/condition/action workflows, with reusable primitives, validation, templates, runtime execution, versioning, and legacy migration.

    - Designed analytics and observability infrastructure for product monitoring, activation tracking, journey analysis, logs, metrics, alerts, and production health.

    - Built multi-channel employee/admin communication workflows across web, email, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Google Chat.

    - Implemented reliable async workflows with durable jobs, retries, rate limits, concurrency controls, idempotency, cancellation paths, and monitoring.

    - Shipped non-breaking rollouts with feature flags, staged migrations, backfills, compatibility layers, and legacy cleanup.

    - Helped raise the engineering bar through code reviews, pragmatic architecture, mentoring, and close product/design collaboration.

  2. Principal Front-end Engineer
    Ricardo.ch
    July 2017 – October 2021
    Sophia-Antipolis, France

    Core contributor of the largest second-hand e-commerce website of Switzerland.
    β€£ Migration of the main pages to React with homemade SSR setup
    β€£ Implementation of BFF APIs using Node.js/Express
    β€£ Lead of the Flow to Typescript migration
    β€£ Preparation of the introduction of Next.js to replace our SSR setup
    β€£ Introduction of react-testing-library and Cypress for testing
    β€£ Introduction of the react-admin framework for our admin tools
    β€£ Contribution to our design system using Material-UI and Storybook
    β€£ Architecture and implementation of realtime Core Web Vitals monitoring using Prometheus and Grafana
    β€£ Frontend error monitoring using Sentry
    β€£ Part of the on-call team to keep the platform up and running 24/7
    β€£ Optimisation of our CI/CD pipelines (CircleCI)
    β€£ Knowledge-sharing and mentoring (documentation, guidelines, code-reviews, pair-programming, workshops organisation)
    β€£ Technical interviews as part of the hiring process
    β€£ Open-source of several projects

  3. Freelance Web Developer
    Freelancing
    May 2016 – December 2021

    As a freelance on my free time, I work on various Javascript projects (mainly using React)

  4. Full-stack engineer
    Milanamos
    August 2014 – June 2017
    Sophia-Antipolis, France

    Development of a SAAS application, powered by AngularJS and Python. We provide many data-oriented dashboards for the air transport industry (airlines and airports).
    Main tasks:
    - design and development of interactive data-powered visualisations using AngularJS, D3 and Leaflet
    - query and transformation of large amount of data in Python/MongoDB
    - setup and maintenance of the continuous integration process using Gitlab

  5. Software Engineering Intern - Amadeus
    Amadeus
    February 2014 – July 2014
    Sophia-Antipolis, France

    Within the Reservations service of Amadeus, I'm developing a product named Community Trip Organizer. It is a web application providing a platform for groups in order to organize trips in a collaborative way.
    Technologies: AngularJS, Play! Framework, REST API, Bootstrap3.

  6. Full-stack engineer
    USEC
    July 2013 – December 2013
    Compiègne, France

    As part of a project with the Junior Company of the UTC, I worked for an organization which help people with disabilities to integrate into non-technical business environments. The aim of the project was the realization of an Android app for tablets allowing people supervised by the organization (called "residents") to assess their workday. The results of these assessments are then synchronized to a server. The screens of the Android application are fully configurable through a web application, used by the staff of the association. The administration application has a dual purpose: to present the results of each resident in a structured layout and to customize the Android app in order to adapt the questions to each resident.
    Technologies: Android, Symfony2, Bootstrap3 & JQuery.

  7. Software Engineer Intern
    Siemens Corporate Research
    August 2012 – February 2013
    Princeton, NJ, USA

    Working in Automation systems and HMI department. I developed mobile applications (native and web) using Android and CSS3/jQuery. Back-end implementation using .NET/C++.
    Technologies: HTML5, CSS3, JQuery, PhoneGap, Push messages, C++, .NET, Android

  8. Student Intern, Software Development
    Frontware Co. Ltd.
    March 2011 – June 2011
    Bangkok, Thailand

    Developed applications for Android mobile devices using Java and CSS3/JQuery in order to compare these two technologies. Also implemented new features and maintained existing websites using PHP and Javascript.

Some pictures from my camera