
Herve Roussel
Verified Expert in Engineering
System Architecture Developer
Singapore, Singapore
Toptal member since February 1, 2016
Hervé is a CTO-level AI and engineering leader helping startups and enterprises turn ambiguous ideas into production systems. He specializes in AI workflows, LLM products, automation platforms, SaaS architecture, and rapid MVPs. Hervé is a former CTO/founder who scaled products from 5,000 to 127,000 users, built platforms serving 250+ million API calls/month, and shipped production systems across the full stack, from LLM back ends to data pipelines.
Portfolio
Experience
- System Architecture - 10 years
- Data Engineering - 10 years
- API Design - 10 years
- Java - 8 years
- SQL - 8 years
- Amazon Web Services (AWS) - 8 years
- Apache Beam - 6 years
Preferred Environment
Redis, JavaScript, Python 3, PostgreSQL, Supabase, Next.js, LLM Integration, API Integration, TypeScript, Agentic AI
The most amazing...
...project I've done was pioneering one of the 1st Foundation LLMs for source code (validated by a Turing Award winner) and scaling to 127,000 users in 18 months.
Work Experience
Engineering Lead, AI & Machine Learning
Enterprise AI & Digital Services Agency
- Delivered production ML classification system, achieving 0.98 precision and 0.94 recall, improving automated resolution by 40%. Exceeded SOTA benchmarks with 9x more detections at 4x lower error rate.
- Built and shipped a multi-agent LLM framework, improving response quality by more than 36% and scaling automated output 11x; delivered the supporting ops portal from zero to production adoption.
- Designed architecture and technical roadmap across 4 concurrent AI/ML products spanning URL classification, fraud detection, conversational AI, and fraud analytics, defining system design, data pipelines, and integration across multiple teams.
Engineering & ML Lead
Indeed
- Co-captained the Pay Transparency program across 6+ product areas (SMB, Taxonomy, SCP, Metadata Salary, Salary Estimation), securing CTO approval for global rollout across Indeed's job seeker and employer platforms.
- Managed 8 engineers directly and influenced 14 across adjacent data science and engineering teams; increased SWE-1 and SWE-2 engagement 25% by transitioning teams to Agile rituals and restructuring sprint planning.
- Unblocked the Pay Transparency roadmap by running 3 cross-functional workshops and producing alignment documentation with contributions from 10+ engineers, 1 SPM, and 3 senior UX designers.
- Coordinated 20+ stakeholders across 6 partner teams (Dradis, Salary Estimation, Metadata Salary, Butterfly Matching, and Ranking) to deliver program architecture and roadmap alignment on an accelerated timeline.
- Worked across Java, Python, AWS, and Airflow on high-scale job matching and salary intelligence infrastructure serving hundreds of millions of job seekers globally.
CTO | Co-founder
Quod AI
- Co-founded an AI code intelligence platform and pioneered one of the first foundation LLMs for source code, scaling from 5,000 to 127,000 users and securing Standard Chartered as an enterprise client.
- Architected and coded the core AI search engine using TensorFlow, Elasticsearch, and Apache Beam, serving 100,000+ users with 78% month-on-month growth.
- Hired, built, and created a productive environment for nine engineers over four teams using Apache Beam/Flink, TensorFlow, MySQL, Elasticsearch, MongoDB, Redis, Node.js, React, and Kubernetes on AWS and GCP.
- Scaled indexing to 400,000 characters/min with 11 proprietary AI models on a restricted budget.
- Set up training and processes for hiring, release, and the architectural board.
- Published blogs, talks, and podcasts for engineers with 20,000+ views combined.
Head of Data Engineering | Back-end Engineer | Architect
Sentifi
- Architected and coded fintech platform ingesting 1+ billion messages, serving 250+ million API calls per month with NLP and deep learning.
- Led and managed a team of 20 engineers using Apache Beam, Google Dataflow, PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, MongoDB, and Spring Boot on Google Cloud.
- Set up processes for engineering training, code review, and release.
CTO
Astoria Road
- Maintained the existing architecture developed using PHP and MySQL on AWS.
- Implemented an admin CMS using a Yii PHP Framework.
- Attended the Plug-and-Play Silicon Valley Accelerator.
- Implemented an automated purchase robot as a proof of concept using Watir.
CTO | Co-founder
Linked Senior
- Architected a 3-tier web-based media distribution platform in Amazon Cloud (EC2, RDS, S3) using JBoss Seam, RichFaces, Hibernate, MySQL, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
- Implemented and designed a CMS for managing content delivery and hardware inventory using YouTube, Wikipedia, and Flickr API.
- Implemented and designed an analytics reporting module using the Google Analytics API and Google Charts.
- Implemented and designed a public user authentication API using SOAP XML web service for a product partner.
- Designed and implemented client software with expanded browser capabilities using Java Webstart, Java Swing, Jetty Server, Google Chrome extensions, JavaScript, and HTML5 WebSockets.
- Led and managed QA using Jenkins, JUnit, Mockito, Selenium WebDriver, and Jasmine.
Engineering Manager
CA
- Led the creation of new architecture and the design of a unified threat management platform.
- Managed and coordinated multiple simultaneous projects that included R&D, builds, QA, and product management teams located in America, Asia, Australia, and Europe involving over 30 people.
- Maintained and contributed to the development of an antispyware research platform delivering critical security signature protection to more than 20 million customers.
Experience
ClauseCheck: AI Contract Review
https://clausecheck.proSentio: Agentic Technology Scouting Platform
https://sentio.mildly.ai/RiskLens: AI Due Diligence Research Platform
https://risklens.netlify.app/Panko: Browser-based Workflow Recorder
https://bit.ly/49LLghWStreetSense: AI Traffic Monitoring Dashboard
https://bit.ly/4v3NW2uTalkWise: AI Voice Conversation Coaching Prototype
https://talkwise.live/I designed and built the end-to-end product workflow, including front-end UX, voice AI integration, serverless back-end functions, transcript evaluation pipelines, and rubric-based scoring logic. The system evaluates communication quality across dimensions like empathy, curiosity, clarity, and engagement balance, then generates actionable coaching feedback and key conversational moments.
The project demonstrates how AI can be embedded into a practical training workflow rather than a generic chatbot experience. It also showcases rapid MVP development, AI workflow orchestration, prompt engineering, and full-stack product prototyping for commercially relevant SaaS applications.
Education
Master of Engineering Degree in Computer Science
Cornell University - Ithaca, NY, USA
Bachelor of Science Degree in Computer Science
George Washington University - Washington D.C., USA
Certifications
Improving Deep Neural Networks
Coursera
Skills
Libraries/APIs
REST APIs, Node.js, React, Playwright, API Development, Google Cloud API, TensorFlow, Vue 3, OpenAI API
Tools
Apache Beam, Cloud Dataflow, Apache Airflow
Languages
Java, SQL, Python, JavaScript, Python 3, TypeScript
Storage
PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, Redis, Google Cloud, MongoDB, Databases, Database Management Systems (DBMS)
Frameworks
Next.js, Selenium, Spring Boot, LangGraph
Platforms
Amazon Web Services (AWS), Netlify, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Docker
Paradigms
ETL, DevOps, Real-time Systems, Serverless Architecture, Foundation Models
Other
API Design, Data Engineering, Chrome Extensions, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Supabase, Full-stack Development, System Architecture, CTO, Software Architecture, Data Scraping, Web Scraping, Architecture, Large Language Models (LLMs), Technical Leadership, Venture Capital, Full-stack, Team Leadership, Data Architecture, Technical Architecture, Vector Databases, Open-source LLMs, Qwen, Code Auditing, Document Processing, RAG Systems, Fintech, Big Data, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, LLM Integration, API Integration, A/B Testing, Business Process Modeling, Workflow Automation, Agentic AI, Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Computer Vision, WebSockets, YOLOv5, Computer Security, Data Mining, Algorithms, Networks, FastAPI, Conversational AI, Supervised Learning, Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT), RAG Architecture, Unsupervised Machine Learning, Supervised Machine Learning
How to Work with Toptal
Toptal matches you directly with global industry experts from our network in hours—not weeks or months.
Share your needs
Choose your talent
Start your risk-free talent trial
Top talent is in high demand.
Start hiring