Performing Remote

Founder

PixMob

Director of Engineering

Nicolas Cava

I'm looking for a long-term relationship with a distributed SaaS business. I'm available right now for full-time permanent employment.

I can speak English or French and work from anywhere.

My expertise:

- Engineering management
- People management
- Strategic planning
- Project execution
- Systems and processes
- Distributed work
- Culture building
- Incident management
- Hiring and onboarding talents

Please connect with me and discuss how we can win together.

Engineering Manager

Zendesk

Zendesk is a large public enterprise with 5500+ employees distributed worldwide. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, California, US.

Industry: customer experience and instant messaging tech.

Responsible for:

→ Lead distributed software teams of up to 14 people.
→ Build core messaging capabilities for Zendesk products.
→ Contribute to the high-end conversational CX strategy.
→ Provide the API, conversation store, message routing, and orchestration pipeline.
→ Provide all the logic and integrations to operate in social channels.
→ Lead weekly tech talks.

Tech stack:

→ React
→ Node.js, Express, Ruby
→ MongoDB, Redis, DynamoDB, RabbitMQ, Kafka
→ Terraform, Istio, AWS
→ Spinnaker

PixMob was a bootstrapped company with 80+ employees distributed worldwide in the event industry. The company was headquartered in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

Industry: event management tech.

Responsible for:

→ Led the software engineering department composed of 10 employees across two continents.
→ Contributed to human-centric experiences, light shows, and corporate event activities.
→ Built edge computing, cloud computing, and high-availability data processing.
→ Built products on top of cutting-edge hardware infrastructure.
→ Supported decentralized authority and execution freedom.
→ Built an async-first culture with an emphasis on writing communication and documentation.
→ Organized 4-week development cycles with shaping, betting, and execution.
→ Provided individual development, coaching, and connections building.
→ Co-led a successful M&A by Bizzabo.

Tech stack:

→ React, React Native, Swift, Kotlin
→ Python
→ MongoDB, Redis, InfluxDB, Elasticsearch
→ Terraform, Nomad, Consul, Google Cloud
→ GitLab CI/CD

Swile

Swile was a VC-funded fintech startup (30M Series A, 70M Series B) with 300 employees distributed in France. The company was headquartered in Montpellier, France.

Industry: fintech.

Responsible for:

→ Led a distributed software team of 10 employees.
→ Built a B2B2C product with banking features, mobile, and web payments.
→ Built bank accounts, transfers, credit card management, and P2P payments.
→ Also built money pots, KYC and compliance, and charity donations.
→ Provided autonomy, ownership, decentralized authority, and execution freedom.
→ Built an async-first culture with a focus on written communication and documentation.
→ Provided individual development, coaching, and connections building.

Tech stack:

→ React, TypeScript, Kotlin, Swift
→ Ruby on Rails, Node.js, GraphQL
→ PostgreSQL, Kafka, Redis
→ AWS, Confluent
→ CircleCI, Bitrise

Swile was a VC-funded fintech startup (30M Series A, 70M Series B) with 300 employees distributed in France. The company was headquartered in Montpellier, France.

Industry: fintech.

Responsible for:

→ Member of a cross-functional and distributed software team.
→ Led a distributed team of 10 employees part-time.
→ Built a B2B2C product for employees and administrators in SMB and mid-market.
→ Built meal voucher credits, credit card orders, and employee management.
→ Also built onboarding, off-boarding, bank accounts, and credit card payments.

Tech stack:

→ React, JavaScript, TypeScript
→ Ruby on Rails
→ PostgreSQL, Redis
→ Heroku, AWS
→ Semaphore

Senior Software Engineer

Maple Inside

Maple Inside was a funded startup studio (2M seed) with 20 employees distributed worldwide. The company was headquartered in Quebec City, Quebec, Canada.

Industry: fintech and adtech.

Responsible for:

→ Co-founded the company with former colleagues.
→ Led a distributed team of 10 employees as head of product development.
→ Bootstrapped business ideas by building MVPs quickly to reach market pull.
→ Profitable products were incorporated into companies with hired founders.
→ Built products in the adtech, sharing economy, and fintech industries.
→ We grew the business to 1M ARR.
→ Had to close operations in 2018 as we consumed our runway.
→ A few companies emerged from the studio and are still in business.

Tech stack:

→ React, React Native, TypeScript
→ Node.js, GraphQL, Python
→ MySQL, Redis
→ AWS, Google Cloud
→ CircleCI

Co-Founder & CTO

PetalMD

PetalMD was a VC-funded healthtech startup with 100 employees distributed in Canada. The company was headquartered in Quebec City, Quebec, Canada.

Industry: healthtech.

Responsible for:

→ Member of a cross-functional software team.
→ Built a B2B product for physicians and healthcare facilities.
→ Also built online management, communication, and planning tools for physicians.

Tech stack:

→ JavaScript, CoffeeScript, Angular
→ Ruby on Rails
→ PostgreSQL, Redis, Elasticsearch, Pusher
→ Heroku
→ Jenkins

Crakmedia

Crakmedia was a bootstrapped adtech startup with 250 employees distributed in Canada. The company was headquartered in Quebec City, Quebec, Canada.

Industry: adtech.

Responsible for:

→ Led a front-end team of 10 employees.
→ Built an affiliate marketing platform supporting billions of daily hits.
→ Also built media buying, advertising platforms, traffic analytics, and offer management.
→ Also built big data processing and data science software.
→ Refactored a huge monolithic to a microservices architecture.
→ Provided individual development, coaching, and connections building.
→ Designed software architecture and technology strategies.
→ Led product analytics and application performance initiatives.

Tech stack:

→ JavaScript, TypeScript, React, Redux
→ Node.js, PHP, Symfony, Express
→ MySQL, Redis, Vertica
→ AWS
→ Bamboo

Front-end Technical Lead

I help remote leaders who are overwhelmed by their workload leave chaos by empowering people and improving self-discipline through the Performing Remote OS. | Fractional Engineering Leader, Coach

I'm a passionate people-first Engineering Manager with 12y+ of experience leading distributed teams for renowned SaaS businesses like Zendesk and Swile in AMER and EMEA.

I'm also a social entrepreneur who cares about positively impacting people and society. My personality type is ESTJ-A, and I'm a systems thinker with strong organizational and self-discipline skills.

My core values are contribution, growth, discipline, justice, transparency, and resilience. I'm also a father, gamer, remote work advocate, traveler, content creator, and developer, which I consider my identity stack.

My backstory is that I burned out in 2018, and remote work saved my life. Since then, I have strived to become the best remote leader I can be for my people and show that we can build exceptional distributed businesses by putting people first and providing opportunities for anyone from anywhere. I also share my journey in public with vulnerability and authenticity to help as many people as possible.

I post daily about remote leadership and personal development. I'm also building the Performing Remote OS, a system I use as a remote leader.

My credentials:

- 12+ years in distributed SaaS businesses in AMER and EMEA
- 10+ years as a successful leader of distributed engineering teams
- Dealt with 525% employee growth over 2 years
- Supervised 76 talents across 4 continents
- Co-founded and scaled a startup studio to 80K+ MRR in 3 years
- 94K+ paying customers in a B2B product
- Led a technical due diligence for a $13.5M M&A
- 6000+ workers supported in the Digital First Crew at Zendesk
- Led competitive virtual gaming teams of up to 40 individuals for 5 years
- 12+ years as a remote worker

Where to start:

- Follow me to receive my daily content
- Connect and DM me for more
- Book a free discovery call: https://www.nicolascava.com/discovery
- Send me an email: hello@nicolascava.com

Fractional vs. full-time CTO. The real math.

Everyone says, "You need to hire a CTO."

Let me show you the receipt before you sign the contract.

Option A: The full-time CTO.
You spend 6 months looking for "The One." Then you pay:

→ $180K base salary
→ $35K benefits & overhead
→ $36K recruiting fees
→ 3-5% equity

Total Year 1 Cost: $251,000 (+ equity).
And you lost 6 months of execution time waiting for them to start.

Option B: The Fractional CTO.
You start next week. You pay:

→ $6K/month retainer
→ $0 benefits
→ 0% equity
→ $0 recruiting fees

Total Year 1 Cost: $72,000.
And you get immediate impact.

Here is the hard truth:
At the pre-seed or seed stage, you do not need 40 hours of "CTO work."

You need about 5-10 week hours of high-level strategy and oversight.

The other 30+ hours?
That's just expensive management overhead you can't afford yet.

The outcome:

You save $180K in hard cash.
You save 3-5% of your equity pool.
You extend your runway by 9 months.

Hire the full-time CTO when you hit Series A.
Rent the brain until then.

P.S.
Want to see exactly what that will get you?
DM me for a breakdown. Let's extend your runway.

Fractional CTO for non-technical founders | Prevent a $100K–$5M rebuild & start selling | Pre-seed & seed B2B SaaS expert | 90% less than a full-time CTO

Tweet-style text by Nicolas Cava saying a full-time seed-stage CTO is a vanity metric, burning ~$200K/year just to look investable on a pitch deck.

Your CTO is lying to you.

The rebuild isn't a tech problem.

1. Rebuilds fail if you repeat the original problems
You had 2 auth providers because product and sales weren't talking.
You have tech debt because priorities shifted and architecture didn't.
New tech doesn't fix broken communication.
Fix alignment first. Rebuild second.

2. No-code is a validation tool, not your product foundation
You build 90% in Lovable. Hit a wall.
Now you're stuck with unmaintainable spaghetti nobody can hire for.
Use no-code to prove the model works.
Then rebuild properly with that certainty.

3. Microservices at year 1 is architectural theater
Developer spends half their time on network infra, not features.
You don't have Google's problems. You have 47 users.
Start modular monolith. Scale when revenue justifies complexity.

4. Premature optimization costs more than tech debt
Building for 10M users when you have 25.
Your constraint isn't throughput. It's PMF.
Boring, proven tech wins. Solve the business problem first.

5. Cheap developers are debt
$40K offshore hire saves nothing. They defer cost to the rebuild.
A $120K solid engineer compounds 3 years of smart decisions.
Bad hiring IS the rebuild. You're just paying for it later.

6. Speed without direction is expensive chaos
Shipping fast feels productive until nothing connects.
Velocity with constraints: narrow features, clear ICP, one revenue model.
Otherwise, you're building a museum of abandoned experiments.

7. Without decision records, every new CTO assumes incompetence
They see your monolith and think it's trash.
No context means they rebuild to prove their value.
Document why you built what you built. Or watch them undo it.

8. Most rebuilds don't need to happen
That legacy system? Fix the 3 critical problems for 10% of rebuild cost.
Rewrites that worked forced the business to choose what mattered.
It wasn't the new framework. It was finally saying no.

9. Profitability discipline beats architectural elegance
Unprofitable companies build expensive stacks and over-hire.
Profitability forces better trade-offs and longer runways.
Treat it as day 1 muscle.

Before you rebuild, answer this:
What organizational problem caused the tech problem?

If you can't answer that, you're about to build the same mess twice.

P.S.
Planning a rebuild in the next 90 days?
DM me your stack and the problems you're solving.
I'll tell you if you actually need to rebuild.

Fractional CTO for burned-out founders. Helping pre-seed & seed startups ship faster at 90% less cost than a full-time CTO. Exhausted? Book a call to reclaim 20–30 hours weekly. ↓

Nicolas Cava in a sunlit living room, seated on a sofa, looking thoughtful as warm light falls through tall windows.

Your dev with no accountability wasted 6 months.

I've watched this kill 40+ startups.

But here's what most founders miss:
Accountability without clarity is just over-engineered blame.

You hand off tech with zero accountability.
Then wonder why you're rebuilding for $500K.

The opposite hurts you too:
Fear-based accountability makes devs hide mistakes.
They stop taking necessary risks.
They optimize for vanity metrics.

The real catch?
You must define what they're accountable FOR.

"Build what scales" is meaningless.
They build microservices in week 3.
Zero revenue. 100% complexity. Bravo.

Accountability to vague goals is accountability to nothing.

Here's what works:

1. Link decisions to business outcomes.
Not "uptime." But "can we onboard 100 users today without breaking."
That's a stake they can own.

2. Make consequences visible.
Prod incident? The dev presents the postmortem to the team.
Not punishment. Learning with skin in the game.

3. Own your tech failures first. Publicly.
Your team will trust you. And stop hiding theirs.
Authority comes from surviving your own bad calls.

Mediocre devs with clear accountability beat genius devs with none.

P.S.
Want accountability in your tech team before burning $100K?
DM me.
I'll show you the exact framework that prevents these rebuilds.

Nicolas Cava in coat and scarf walking on a snowy city sidewalk by parked cars and brick rowhouses, winter trees and frosted shrubs lining the street.

The best teams deploy 208 times more than you.

Not because they are larger.
Because they removed the part where humans break things.

Your deployment process is a nightmare.

You hold your breath.
You pray nothing breaks.
You push manually because it's "faster than automating."

It's not.

Every manual step is a loaded gun:

→ Forgot to run migrations? Production's down
→ Wrong env variable? Users see test data
→ Skipped a build step? 500 server error

You'll automate "when you have time."
You won't.

You'll just keep stacking risk. Keep burning hours.

Your slow deployment is killing your learning speed.
Every week you don't ship is a week you don't learn.

You don't need perfect CI/CD.
You need one automated staging push this week.

Start there.
Add a test.
Add a rollback.

Repeat.

Fast, boring deployments mean your team can experiment.

Automate it and ship.

P.S.
Ready to automate? Let's fix your pipeline fast.
DM “STRATEGY” now to book a free call.

Dark social post from Nicolas Cava with profile photo and text urging automation: "Manual deploys are expensive" and bullets about midnight panics, broken production.

You're building a perfect stack.

But you're burning cash.

Unprofitable companies obsess over architecture.
They over-hire.
They build expensive systems nobody asked for.

Profitable companies make brutal trade-offs.
They extend runway.
They survive.

Profitability isn't a milestone.
It's day 1 discipline.

Choose survival over elegance.

Dark social post layout showing a verified account avatar and text: "You're scaling a product. No one's paying for it. Congrats on burning faster."

NVIDIA

GeForce NOW SDK team:  building the SDK for the world's largest video game streaming platform

    • Developed a versatile testing framework for the GeForce NOW (GFN) SDK, enabling local testing and CI/CD pipeline integration using C++, CMake, GoogleTest, Python, protobuf; supporting both Windows (MSVC) & UNIX (GCC) environments
    • Engineered a testing solution that covers multiple components of the GFN SDK, from API code integrated into video games to server-side components, by building a mock server environment to simulate diverse cloud-based test scenarios
    • Improved code coverage, enabling early error detection and facilitating smoother development processes; reduced code regressions and enhanced the overall stability of the GFN SDK; truly empowers agile development on the product
    • Collaborated across global, cross-functional teams, drafted software requirements, ensured seamless remote teamwork

Software Engineer

• Developed core business features and APIs on the Sunshine Conversations messaging platform in Node.js and JavaScript/TypeScript
    • Led an initiative to enhance file upload and validation, reducing false-positive failures by approximately 33%, while coordinating with Engineering and Security teams around the globe on design and implementation
    • Presented and demonstrated new product feature to senior executives and a large audience at quarterly product meeting
    • Contributed to client issue resolution; improved security by addressing vulnerabilities; actively participated in code reviews, testing, architectural decisions, and agile development cycles; provided comprehensive documentation

UofT Hatchery

• Implemented a new set of Flask APIs and redesigned the database schema to support new search and autocomplete functionality; used AsyncIO and threading for better I/O performance under stress; utilized OOP principles extensively
• Introduced Elasticsearch which attained a search response time of ~20ms, and simplified search implementation
• Improved user experience of partner- and team-finding by redesigning and implementing the new UI to be more simplistic and less cumbersome; introduced a tags-based system for matching and search-ranking which improved search relevance and ease of use
• Implemented the UI frontend improvements with HTML5/CSS3/JavaScript, and the Vue.js framework
• Provided detailed documentation, including a testing guide and a production server deployment guide

Full Stack Software Engineer

Available to start a new position in May!

Software Engineer skilled across the tech stack from frontend to backend to infrastructure. 

Check out my Maker Portfolio to see my projects. Feel free to get in touch!

Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Node.js, C, Linux, SQL, Flask, Java, Spring Boot, Elasticsearch, web development, APIs, and much more!

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