> whoami

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, Staff DevX at Emma The Sleep Company, building the platform that around 100 engineers ship on. Before Germany, ten-plus years building e-commerce for the largest retailers across the Middle East.

I write and speak about platform engineering, observability, and the way AI is reshaping how engineers work.

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 family, travel, and the occasional systems metaphor for everything else.

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

Experience

  • Staff DevX Engineer

    Emma The Sleep Company May 2020 - Current

    Architecting and maintaining the IaC setup using Pulumi, GitHub Actions, Kubernetes, and AWS for a global e-commerce platform serving millions of customers across 35+ countries.

    Driving developer experience for ~100 engineers across 15 product teams through automation, AI-powered tooling, and self-service internal platforms, reducing deployment friction and increasing engineering velocity. Same stack delivered zero downtime through 20× peak traffic on Black Friday.

  • Tech Lead

    The Volunteer Circle March 2017 - February 2024

    Founding engineer and tech lead for Lebanon's largest volunteering platform, building it from the ground up alongside primary employment.

    Owned platform performance, scalability, and infrastructure across 7 years of growth.

  • Tech Lead / DevEx Engineer

    Addbloom January 2020 - February 2021

    Tech Lead and DevEx owner across client engagements at a MENA web development agency.

    Set technical standards, code review practices, and CI/CD baselines used by all teams.

  • Tech Lead / DevEx Engineer

    Grand Stores Online September 2018 - December 2019

    Led the full technical overhaul of GS Online's e-commerce platform, managing the complete migration from Magento 1.9 CE to Magento 2 Enterprise Edition on Cloud.

    Cut average page load from ~800ms to ~200ms and shifted releases from weekly batches to feature-based deploys.

  • 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.

  • Co-Founder

    Triangle December 2010 - December 2015

    Co-founded Triangle SARL, a full-service web development agency. Served as technical lead and de facto CTO, owning architecture and database decisions, delivery management, and team mentorship.

Skills

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, Beanstalk)
  • Kubernetes
  • Docker
  • Helm
  • Pulumi (IaC)
  • Terraform
  • Cloudflare
  • GitHub Actions

Observability

  • Grafana
  • New Relic
  • PagerDuty
  • ElasticSearch
  • LogStash
  • Kibana

Programming Languages

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

Frameworks & Platforms

  • Magento
  • Laravel
  • Symfony

Data

  • MySQL
  • PostgreSQL
  • MongoDB
  • Redis

Tooling

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

Spoken Languages

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

Credentials

Grafana ObservabilityCon 2023

Public Talk • Berlin, Germany

How Grafana Cloud turned Black Friday into a dream sales day for Emma The Sleep Company: observability, real-time monitoring, and performance at scale. Zero downtime through 20× peak traffic.

Watch Talk →

telc Deutsch B1 Certificate

Language Certification • telc Verified

German language certification at B1 level (CEFR). Working proficiency for everyday professional and social life in Germany.

Verify Certificate →

DevSecOps Certification

Certification • Credly Verified

Security across the full development lifecycle: code review, dependency scanning, infrastructure hardening, and deployment pipelines.

View Badge →

Lead your Stakeholders Bootcamp

Certification • Bootcamp

Leading without formal authority: alignment across competing priorities, trust-building with senior stakeholders, and constructive handling of pushback.

View Certificate →