Sylvain Cau

About Sylvain Cau

Twenty years building software – from PHP and Angular in Paris to Kubernetes controllers and GitOps in San Francisco. Somewhere along the way I shifted from solving product problems to solving engineering-organization problems.Currently Senior Staff Engineer at Omada Health, working across infrastructure, release engineering, and engineering practices. Hands-on with our Kubernetes stack (CRDs, controllers, tooling), driving the migration to GitOps with ArgoCD and Kargo, and shaping the way we release – tagged releases, migration risk analysis, expand-contract patterns over heroic rollbacks.Also shaping engineering-wide practices: engineering principles, architecture guidelines, tech debt process, database migration patterns, and firefighter-training for incident response.I care about data over opinion, writing as a leverage tool, and keeping systems running in ways that don\'t burn people out.I write at 4sh.dev and ship side projects when I should be sleeping.

Experience

1. Senior Staff Software Engineer

   Omada Health

   Feb 2022 — Present · San Francisco, CA, US

   Operating across engineering on infrastructure, release practices, and engineering-wide standards.Engineering practices- Writing cross-engineering standards: engineering principles, architecture guidelines, and tech debt management process- Designing a quarterly Firefighter Training program – simulated incident-response drills on our production stack (Rails, RDS, Redis, Kubernetes, Sidekiq, Datadog). Targets: lower MTTR, reduced escalation to platform, stronger on-call confidence- Organizing the Staff Engineer community across engineering.Release engineering & GitOps- Driving the shift from continuous deployment to intentional, tag-based releases with CI-generated changelogs, automated migration risk analysis, version-bump recommendations keyed to deployment risk, and Kargo-gated promotion- Leading the GitOps migration with ArgoCD and Kargo- Wrote the Database Migration Patterns guideline applying Expand-Contract, as the practical backbone of the release framework.Infrastructure & tooling- Maintainer of our Kubernetes application-config system – CRDs, controllers, and CLI tooling that abstract cluster complexity for application teams while preserving platform-level validation. Stateful controller replacing the prior stateless CLI for more control and validation- Supported the migration from Nomad to Kubernetes across the stack – custom Go CLI using CRDs for deployment abstraction, per-engineer pod consoles with Okta auth, CI/CD templates- Built tooling so engineers can push code branches to Kubernetes with their own isolated DB and Redis instances, for realistic pre-merge testing- Standardized multi-arch Docker image builds using Kaniko with manifest tooling so teams deploy the same tag regardless of architecture- Deployed n8n internally to enable engineering automations across teams.AI- Partnering with the AI team on applied AI work.Stack: Go, Ruby, Python, Bash • Kubernetes, ArgoCD, Kargo, Terraform • Datadog • GitLab CI • n8n • Rails

Education

• CPE Lyon

  Engineer in Computer science and Communication Networks

  2005 — 2008

• Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1

  Technical Degree in Computer science

  2004 — 2005

• Université du Creusot

  Technical degree in Electrical Engineering and Industrial Computing

  2002 — 2004

Skills

• Functional Programming
• Ember.js
• Javascript
• Html 5
• Html5
• Scrum
• Elm
• Docker
• Php
• Node.js
• Mysql
• Git
• Sass
• Xml
• Continuous Integration
• Vue.js
• Méthodes Agiles
• Jquery
• Sql
• Linux
• Agile Methodologies
• Angularjs
• Less
• Front-End
• Web Development
• Electron
• Css