> whoami

Charbel Wakim

Staff Software Engineer · Platform & AI

My name is Charbel Wakim, Lebanese, based in Frankfurt.

The story started the first time I saw Doom on a PC. I begged my parents to get me one, then immediately dismantled it to see how it worked. I have not stopped taking things apart since.

Today I am a Staff Software Engineer at Emma The Sleep Company. I build the platform around 100 engineers ship on, and the agentic flow on top of it: the refinery shapes a request into tickets, the forge builds them in headless jobs, and a maintenance bot ships vulnerability fixes across ~700 repositories. Ticket to merge is 2.3× faster, and the goal is to put it in the hands of all ~1,000 Emmies. That makes 15+ years building for the web, 12 of them in e-commerce.

I write and speak about platform engineering, observability, and the way AI is reshaping how engineers work, and I maintain a set of open-source Claude Code plugins. I also run a chief of staff of my own: Nadim, a small team of Claude Code agents that plans, builds, and reviews a side project at night.

Outside of work, the geek runs deep: gaming, Star Wars, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, and whatever rabbit hole I have fallen into this week. When I step away from the keyboard, I write at Life in Production about life across borders, travel, and the occasional systems metaphor for everything else.

Walk through my experience, download my CV, or just reach out.

Experience

> git log --oneline career

  • Staff Software Engineer

    Emma The Sleep Company May 2020 – Present

    Built Emma's agentic delivery flow on Claude Code: the refinery turns a request into refined Jira tickets, the forge develops them in headless jobs on Kubernetes, and a maintenance bot fixes vulnerabilities and failing tests on its own.

    Ticket to merge went from 7.7 h to 3.38 h on average (2.3× faster), with 248 agentic tickets a month, 88% of forge work accepted by the second run, and 1,605 vulnerability fixes a month across ~700 repositories. The goal is to take it from ~20 early adopters to all ~1,000 Emmies, not only the engineers.

    Own the infrastructure as code and the developer platform (Pulumi, GitHub Actions, Kubernetes, AWS) that ~100 engineers across 15 product teams ship on. The same stack held zero downtime through 20× peak traffic on Black Friday.

    Cut system operational costs by ~60% through automated peak-hour scaling and infrastructure modernization.

    Guided architecture and standards as the engineering team grew from 8 to 30+ developers, at a company turning over €1B a year.

  • Technical Consultant

    The Volunteer Circle March 2017 – February 2024

    Built the volunteering platform from scratch in PHP/Laravel, then stayed on as technical consultant, alongside primary employment, until 2024.

    NGOs manage their profiles and review volunteers, and thousands of volunteering requests a day arrive through APIs and CSV imports.

  • Tech Lead

    Addbloom January 2020 – February 2021

    Tech lead across client engagements at a web development agency, alongside Emma from May 2020.

    Moved client stacks from self-hosted servers to AWS and set the Git, code review, and CI/CD baselines every team used.

  • Tech Lead

    Grand Stores September 2018 – December 2019

    Led the migration of Grand Stores' e-commerce platform from Magento 1.9 CE to Magento 2 Enterprise Edition on Cloud.

    Cut average page load by ~75%, from ~800ms to ~200ms, and moved releases from weekly batches to feature-based deploys.

    Engineered a real-time integration between Microsoft Dynamics and Magento 2 for customer data and the online loyalty program.

  • Tech Lead

    Keeward February 2014 – August 2018

    Led multiple e-commerce development teams within a 40-person engineering org, owning all major marketplace integrations including Amazon, FNAC, Walmart, and Abebooks, enabling clients to expand their reach across global platforms.

    Contributed to a machine-learning pricing algorithm that dynamically adjusted prices based on seasonal trends and competitor metrics.

  • Co-Founder & CTO

    Triangle December 2010 – December 2015

    Co-founded a full-service web development agency and owned its technology: architecture, stack, hosting, delivery, and mentoring the team. Ran alongside Keeward from 2014.

    Exited in December 2015.

Skills

> which everything

AI & DevEx

  • Claude / OpenAI APIs
  • Prompt Engineering
  • AI-Powered DevEx
  • LLM Integration
  • GitHub Copilot
  • Claude Code

Cloud & Infrastructure

  • AWS (EC2, RDS, S3, ElastiCache, Cognito, Route53, IAM, VPC / PrivateLink, OpenSearch, DocumentDB, Beanstalk)
  • Kubernetes
  • Docker
  • Helm
  • Pulumi (IaC)
  • Terraform
  • Cloudflare
  • GitHub Actions

Observability

  • Grafana
  • OpenTelemetry
  • Prometheus
  • Loki
  • New Relic
  • PagerDuty
  • DORA Metrics

Programming Languages

  • PHP
  • TypeScript
  • Node.js
  • Go
  • Python

Frameworks & Platforms

  • Fastify
  • Magento
  • Laravel
  • Symfony

Data

  • MySQL
  • PostgreSQL
  • MongoDB
  • Redis
  • Elasticsearch

Tooling

  • Bash / Shell
  • Linux / macOS
  • REST / GraphQL APIs

Spoken Languages

  • English: Bilingual
  • French: Fluent
  • Arabic: Native
  • German: B1