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.

I mostly work with TypeScript, React, AI systems, and pragmatic architecture. I like taking vague product ideas and turning them into fast, reliable software, from the data model and UI details to rollouts, monitoring, 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 that built Elba's B2B security SaaS from the first MVP to a production platform.

    Worked across TypeScript, React, Next.js, GraphQL, PostgreSQL, Inngest, analytics, observability, and AI-assisted product features. I owned product areas from problem framing to UI, rollout, monitoring, and maintenance.

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

    • Built a training editor with AI-assisted generation, translation, quizzes, localized previews, and rendering for 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 clean editing flows.
    • Built a visual security automation editor for trigger/condition/action workflows, including 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 employee and 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.

    • Migrated the main pages to React with a custom SSR setup.
    • Implemented BFF APIs using Node.js and Express.
    • Led the Flow to TypeScript migration.
    • Prepared the introduction of Next.js to replace the custom SSR setup.
    • Introduced React Testing Library and Cypress for testing.
    • Introduced react-admin for internal admin tools.
    • Contributed to the design system using Material UI and Storybook.
    • Designed and implemented real-time Core Web Vitals monitoring with Prometheus and Grafana.
    • Set up frontend error monitoring with Sentry.
    • Joined the on-call rotation to keep the platform running 24/7.
    • Optimized CI/CD pipelines with CircleCI.
    • Shared knowledge and mentored through documentation, guidelines, code reviews, pair programming, and workshops.
    • Took part in technical interviews.
    • Open-sourced several internal projects.
  3. Freelance Web Developer
    Freelancing
    May 2016 – December 2021

    Worked on JavaScript projects as a freelancer in my spare time, mainly with React.

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

    Built a SaaS application with AngularJS and Python, providing data-oriented dashboards for the air transport industry, mainly airlines and airports.

    • Designed and developed interactive data visualizations using AngularJS, D3, and Leaflet.
    • Queried and transformed large datasets with Python and MongoDB.
    • Set up and maintained the continuous integration process with GitLab.
  5. Software Engineering Intern - Amadeus
    Amadeus
    February 2014 – July 2014
    Sophia-Antipolis, France

    Built Community Trip Organizer from scratch in the Amadeus Reservations team, turning product specs into a working prototype for groups planning trips together.
    Technologies: AngularJS, Play! Framework, REST API, Bootstrap3.

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

    Built an Android tablet app and web administration platform for an organization supporting workers with disabilities in sheltered workshops. Workers used the tablet app to assess their workday, while staff used the web app to configure questions for each worker and review the results.
    Technologies: Android, Symfony2, Bootstrap3 & JQuery.

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

    Worked in the Automation Systems and HMI department. Built native and web mobile applications with Android and CSS3/jQuery, and implemented backend features with .NET and 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

    Built Android mobile applications with Java and CSS3/jQuery to compare both approaches. Also implemented new features and maintained existing websites with PHP and JavaScript.

Some pictures from my camera