Balthazar Rouberol

Infrastructure craftsman in an AI age

A black and white hand drawn sketch of a lighthouse lantern

Hi! My name is Balthazar.

I’m currently employed as a Staff Site Reliability Engineer at the Wikimedia Foundation, for which I’m working remotely from France.

I consider myself a craftsman A bit pretentious but why not, in an age where AI makes it possible for everyone to write code without acquiring skill. What defines what we do isn’t the code we write, it is what we build, as well as the drive to learn, understand and create new things. I thus have the hubris to believe that craft won’t be replaced by slop.

I have 13+ years of experience working as a Software Engineer, DevOps, Site Reliability Engineer and Engineering Team Lead. I have worked in organizations ranging from small startups to publicly traded companies, international non-profits, as well as a government agency.

On my spare time, I am an avid tabletop role-playing game master A black and white hand drawn sketch of a roleplaying d20 die, having rolled a natural 1Oh no., and can often be found walking the local woods with my dog.

A black and white hand drawn sketch of a steam engine, in an industrial revolution mechanical design drawing style

Skillset

I have operated from small self-hosted to extremely large cloud infrastructures, and have years of experience with using containerization runtimes Much big data in production, hosting up to Petabyte-size datastores spanning thousands of hosts.

I have helped deploy large footprints in all major public cloud providers, AWS GovCloud and on-premise datacenters. I’m used to being on-call, setting up strong monitoring, responding to incidents, and writing postmortems.

I am an extremely fast learner, and am always interested in broadening my toolset. I work best when given the time to go deep on a particular topic, but can also multitask between different priorities if required.

I have been lauded for my communication skills, as well as my attention and empathy towards the teams I service.

Here’s a mish-mash of some of my favourite tools:

I am pretty good at this Kubernetes thing but it has way too much YAML to be listed in there

  • Linux
  • Python
  • Docker
  • Ansible
  • Kafka
  • Writing
A black and white hand drawn sketch of a light bulb, that could have been taken out of a Thomas Edison sketchbook

Experience

Wikimedia Foundation - 2023 - current

Senior > Staff Reliability Engineer: Management of the many systems composing the Wikimedia Data Platform. Strong focus on the development of the Citation neededKubernetes services and compute platform for the Data Platform Engineering team.

Alan - 2022 - 2023

Senior Software Engineer: Member of the team in charge of Et la marmotte elle met le chocolat dans le papierimproving performance of the system processing health claims for all french members, to support Alan doubling in size.

~~~~~~ Mental health break ~~~~~~

Datadog - 2017 - 2022

Kubernetes Deployments Team Lead: In charge of the company-wide deployment platform.

Data Reliability Infrastructure Team Lead: You get a Kafka cluster
you get a Kafka cluster everybody gets a Kafka cluster In charge of providing a deployment platform to the Datadog Datastore teams, allowing them to deploy to Kubernetes, monitor, operate and automate about a thousand datastores clusters (some at Petabyte scale) safely and efficently.

Data Reliability Engineer > Senior Data Reliabily Engineer: Design, management, scaling and monitoring of the You should not run datastores on Kubernetes or so I have been told
 Datadog core datastores: Kafka, ZooKeeper and Cassandra. Deployment of these datastores to Kubernetes, supporting Datadog in its multi-cloud migration.

OVH - 2015 - 2017

Douce Roubaix Valley. Oups Raf annonce une slash deux. On vous heberge fort. DevOps > Tech Lead: Design, development and industrialisation of a managed Mesos platform, a managed Docker platform, and a managed Docker registry, all of which production-bearing.

Mapado - 2015

Independant contractor: Python re-implementation of the SimpleNLG-EN/Fr java library, which enables bilingual text surface realization.

Askin - 2015

Independant contractor: Re-implementation of the backend of a large, monolithic django application exposing complex advertisement data into a distributed application.

Registers of Scotland - 2014

Independant contractor: Building systems to support the Scotland Land Registry Act (2012), specifically allowing the creation of Advance Notices when selling/transferring deeds. Integration of new and legacy systems.

Mapado - 2012 - 2014

Software Engineer: Implementation of an automatic datamining pipeline aggregating and merging data from various sources into an informative event description. The pipeline processes tens of thousands of documents every day.

Kozea - 2012

Independant contractor: Development of a document/database oriented Flask extension simplifying the implementation of the generic views of a web app.

TinyEars - 2012

Independant contractor: Voice recognition research. Adapting and training of a PocketSphinx acoustic model using pre-recorded data, in order to enhance recognition performances on feminine voices.

Strongsteam - 2012

Intern: Development of a data-mining and A.I. cloud-based API to extract information out of images, video, audio and text files: RESTful API development, OCR research.

INSA de Lyon - 2012

Intern: Prototyping of an alumni network for the BIM department.

A+A - 2011

Intern: Development of a statistical analysis and visualization C# web app.

CGMC - 2010

Intern: Internship at the CGMC: Study and modeling of the stochastic expression of the mCherry gene.

A black and white hand drawn sketch of a mechanical typewriter, a blank piece of paper already inserted in

Writings

I have been blogging quite regularly since 2012. Most of what I write is in english, but the occasional french article sometimes slips in.

I reguarly publish code to my personal git forge, and sometimes to Github, when I have to.

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Talks

A black and white hand drawn sketch of a Victorian-style street lights, with 2 lanterns

Personal life

I’m a husband, father, city councillor, companion of cats and dog (singular). I find joy in reading, spending time in the outdoors every day, spending a shameful amount of time thinking about, listening to and playing roleplaying games. A black and white hand drawn sketch of a roleplaying d20 die, having rolled a natural 1Oh come on.I even sometimes craft roleplaying accessories and write about it.

I use my professional skills to self-host quite a bit of services for myself and others. I think knowledge should be shared, feelings should be expressed, and pretty much everyone in the current US administration should go to jail.

A black and white hand drawn sketch of a hand writing using a fountain pen

Contact me

Feel free to contact me via br@imap.cc, except if you are a member of said US administration.