Pierre-Alexandre St-Jean

Pierre-Alexandre St-Jean

Principal Software Engineer

Quebec, QC, Canada
1 (418) 952-9232

About Me

Engineering leader with 12+ years building and scaling high-performance teams. Proven track record in fintech, compliance (SOC2), and full-stack architecture. Experience growing engineering organizations from startup to scale-up environments.

EDUCATION

B.Eng. Software Engineering

École de Technologie Supérieure

2013 | Montreal, Canada

Technical College (DEC) - Computer Technology

Cégep de Sept-Îles

2009 | Sept-Îles, Canada

Links

PROJECTS

BlackboxDB.io (Sold)

Jan 2018 - June 2021

Québec, Canada

Built a passwordless nodejs & rust analytics solution to optimize water filters in the mining industry

TALKS

The Rust Programming Language

Cabane.io

October 2018

Microservices Without Interruption

Web à Québec

April 2017

WORK EXPERIENCE

Principal Engineer

March 2025 - August 2025

Pinata | Remote

  • Migrated Infrastructure resources from AWS to Cloudflare and Digital Ocean to reduce infrastructure cost by 50%
  • Introduced River a queing & job system to allow multiple job types, running in parallel
  • Added import mechanism from multiple IPFS provider allowing clients to migrate from Competitors

Principal Software Engineer & Information Security Officer

February 2023 - March 2025

Blissbook | Remote

  • Led security and engineering projects for HR software platform, achieving SOC 2 Type I and II certification in under 3 months
  • Architected and developed HR data synchronization system for organizations with 50k+ employees, supporting 50+ HR platforms
  • Decreased deployment time from 3 hours to under 15 minutes by implementing automated and simple CI/CD processes and optimizing software
  • Collaborated with the CEO to develop thorough security policies and compliance procedures

Lead Software Engineer - Infrastructure

October 2021 - October 2022

Baseten | Remote

  • Reduced AWS infrastructure costs by 60% through optimizing machine size, number of running instances and migrating to spot instance
  • Implemented OpenTelemetry observability stack and structured logging system platform-wide
  • Accelerated SOC2 certification by automating infrastructure, and implementing Drata
  • Managed Kubernetes-based application Python/Django platform for hosting AI models

Senior Software Developer & Site Reliability Engineer

February 2021 - October 2021

Braver Health | Quebec

  • Led Quebec health law accreditation projects
  • Designed and implemented services using Rust, Elixir, Python, and Flutter
  • Enhanced Google Cloud Platform and Kubernetes infrastructure
  • Put observability and alerting tools in place
  • Created an efficient incident response plan

Engineering Manager

August 2020 - February 2021

1Password | Remote

  • Received 'Security Employee of the Month' award for discover and address a CVE using typed Go
  • Led a team of 6 (3 Customer Support Level 3/4 and 3 Developers) in successfully integrating 1Password with Identity providers (Azure, Okta, etc.) via the SCIM protocol

Engineering Team Lead - Billing & Internationalization

September 2019 - August 2020

Pleo | Remote

  • Leading a team of 5, Project priorization and analysis, technical and non functional, 1 on 1s
  • Architecture of AWS & Google cloud based Financial software
  • Migration to new pricing plans, localization development
  • Lead the BI and analytics team for the Pleo product

Senior Software Engineer

September 2017 - September 2019

Pleo | Remote

  • Architected AWS/GCP-based financial software processing millions in transactions
  • Implemented synchronization with banking and credit card processing systems
  • Architected and improved scalability of fraud detection mechanism
  • Built analytics infrastructure supporting business intelligence initiatives
  • Scaled the platform from 15 to 400 employees while maintaining system reliability

Engineering Team Lead

January 2017 - September 2017

Coveo | Capitale-Nationale, Quebec, Canada

  • Lead the cloud infrastructure team (planification, one on one, ...)
  • Deployment of container clusters (Kubernetes)
  • Lead the infrastructure as code effort through all the company
  • Organize and participate in hackathons and conferences
  • Build Cloud infrastructure platform management software
  • Contibute to Kubernetes open-source project

Lab Teacher / Software Engineering Processes

September 2015 - May 2016

Université Laval | Capitale-Nationale, Quebec, Canada

  • Build a new practical lab on software engineering processes, based on Github, Travis-ci
  • Give lectures on software engineering processes in the industry
  • Help students with the laboratories

Software Developer

December 2014 - January 2017

Coveo | Capitale-Nationale, Quebec, Canada

  • Analytics backend developer, >2.5M events/day
  • Database Optimizations SQL(Redshift) Schema and queries
  • Implementation of Load balancing of Database clusters
  • Build automated Cloud infrastructure for demo environment (docker, consul & AWS)
  • Contibute to Kubernetes
  • Organize and participate in hackathons and conferences
  • Build front-end demos and applications using Coveo's platform