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

I'm moving all my documents to Markdown and JSON files.

My trust in tech companies is gone.

If you can't open it in a text editor, you don't own it.

The Greenland crisis woke me up, without mentioning what's going on right now. US-based infrastructure is a geopolitical risk. Your Google Docs, Notion databases? All subject to executive orders and risks you can't predict.

Proprietary formats tie your intellectual property to companies that answer to governments, not you. They require various dependencies across your stack that multiply risks in your supply chain.

Markdown and JSON are perfect for me:

→ Plain text. Human-readable. Zero dependencies.
→ No rendering engines. No vendor APIs to get deprecated.
→ Readable in 50 years.

I can just use pure version control with Git this way, as I always did with code. Full history. Branch strategies. Native, cross-platform collaboration. I access my knowledge through the terminal, with 0 noise and close to the OS.

I don't even depend on any vendor-specific UI.

It's even more significant with AI: LLMs are the new interface to my entire knowledge. They just work best with structured, portable text. I can use local LLMs without depending on cloud-based ones.

Markdown and JSON are native to every AI tool. Current and future.

Proprietary formats? You're betting your intellectual capital on translation layers you don't control and vendors you depend on.

Portable formats are the only exit strategy.

It's all about claiming back sovereignty.

My intellectual property. Playbooks. Strategies. Frameworks. Tools.

Those are assets.

Assets depreciate when depending on formats subject to platform risk.

I strongly believe sovereignty is a growing competitive advantage.

Especially now.

Fractional CTO for early-stage founders. Prevent 7-figure rebuilds and ship faster. 0 → Series A expert for AI-native startups.

Nicolas Cava sits on a couch, holding a coffee cup, looking serious, with a TV in the background displaying a blurred image.

AI makes me faster, but I feel further behind.

Regardless of how fast I move, I feel I can do more per day.

I hate inefficiency. Always have. I spent all my career experimenting with ways to become more productive.

Now I hit a level I never had before LLM. But it never feels like enough.

I touch maybe 10% of the potential.

AI removed the bottleneck of execution. Now the bottleneck is decision-making. What to work on, not how fast I can do it.

The constraint shifted to my judgment.

I felt this when I discovered software engineering 20 years ago. When I built my first transpiler. When I started leading my first distributed team.

But AI tastes different.

Previous tools had a cap. LLM doesn't seem to have one yet.

The ceiling keeps moving, fast.

It's like knowing a language exists but only being fluent in a few phrases. I can see the shape of what's possible but can't access all of it yet.

It's probably more psychological.

There's real anxiety from knowing I could be doing more.

A new type of FOMO.

Every time I integrate AI into a new workflow, I discover three more where it could help. Solving one inefficiency reveals five others.

"Done" is now a moving target.

I can always iterate more. Improve more. Ship more.

Instead of feeling behind, maybe the right perspective is I'm early. 99% of people haven't even started integrating AI deeply.

The discomfort I'm feeling is perhaps the pain of being ahead. Not behind.

Do you feel this? Did you hit a good enough ceiling and stop?

Nicolas Cava's account discuss the pressure of productivity and the anxiety of limitless potential.

AI made most Fractional CXO services worthless.

Generic advice is now free and instant.

Fractional CTOs are mostly on the right side of this shift, but not entirely. Tech stack selection advice is worth zero. Any founder can ask AI.

Architecture diagrams? Commoditized.
Mechanical code review? 80% replaced.
Best practices? No longer sellable.

My accumulated knowledge became irrelevant in 2 years.

Just like that.

What's scarce now is what makes me human:

Judgment, taste, accountability, emotional intelligence.

Experts with no personality or opinions will disappear. I now channel what my experience forged me into becoming this singular person. Differentiating all I have based on this. Building up from who I really am.

Distinguish myself from the mass.

AI-powered founders overbuild. AI gives advice with zero consequences.

A leader who owns outcomes? That's where I want to be.

Hiring judgment matters more when candidates use AI to hide skill gaps. Ambiguity (build vs. buy, raise vs. stay lean) requires human pattern recognition. Organizational design for AI-native teams is new territory.

No playbook exists.

So I shifted my model.

From "I bring expertise" to "I bring character and accountability."
From "I'll help you build" to "I'll stop you from making mistakes."

A founder with AI can scaffold an entire app in a day. Without a CTO.

What remains? The messy, high-stakes, ambiguous ones. Saying "go talk to customers" with enough credibility to be heard.

The industry shifted. So did I.

Nicolas Cava critiques outdated expertise in tech, emphasizing the rapid gaining of knowledge through AI tools like Claude.

AI made me more productive and way more stupid.

Nobody talks about this tradeoff.

I realized it was rewiring my brain for the worse.

Delegate complex reasoning to AI? Your prefrontal cortex gets used less.

That's where you plan. Where you decide.

You accumulate cognitive debt. You lose the ability to deal with ambiguity without a prompt.

The harsh truth: More trust in AI means less critical thinking. Your confidence grows, and your task ownership drops. You become passive.

That's cognitive atrophy right here.

The brain is plastic. Neuroplasticity works both ways.

8 hours a day in prompt-response loops? Your brain rewires for short-term pattern recognition. Long-form analytical reasoning atrophies.

I spent time digging into this. The danger is real.

For adults, yes. For children? Generational disaster.

My kids don't use AI yet. They will soon. I'm preparing them now.

It severely impacts adult brains. Imagine developing minds.

We cannot gamble with their future. Not enough education on the matter. Not enough experience on AI's impact.

All of this is going far too fast, and we must take responsibility.

Seeing this in yourself? Tell me in the comments. ↓

Nicolas Cava with short gray hair and a beard, gazes thoughtfully out a window, sunlight highlighting his face and a cozy interior setting.

Stop looking to corporations for principles.

Anthropic quietly removed safeguards to stay competitive.

Yes. They turned down the Pentagon offer yesterday. But they've still been quietly reshaping their ethics.

Example: They originally pledged to pause work on more powerful models if their AI outpaced their ability to control it and ensure safety.

Now: Development will only be delayed "until and unless we no longer believe we have a significant lead" over rival AI companies.

People were shocked.

I'm just not.

Businesses don't defend principles. They defend market position.

No matter how much you want to believe it.

The moment principles threaten growth? Quietly discarded.

And it's not even about businesses being evil. It's just systemic.

Unfortunately, the market doesn't reward principles.

(Not enough, at the very least.)

You want inspiration? Look at individuals.
You want change? Influence your local politics.
You want impact? Build something for 50 people who need it.

Quit waiting for corporations to be your moral compass.

They can't be. They're optimized for shareholder value, not your values.

Principles don't scale in businesses. They dilute.

Build yours locally. Defend them personally.

That's the only path that works.

Nicolas Cava's account displays a message about startups facing ethical challenges between principles and growth, predicting common pitfalls.

3,000 followers.

From hardship and consistently showing up.

I'm honored.

What I'm also proud of is I don't do outbound. No growth hacks. No engagement pods. Just pure organic.

Every follower chose to be here.

My journey?

Started from zero on Twitter (became X), then moved here.

I stopped posting for 1.5 years after over 650 posts in 2 years. I had to be hands-on executing first. But then I burned out (a second time).

Came back different.

I used to write about servant leadership and remote work. Now? What early-stage founders actually need from a Fractional CTO, alongside more personal growth and vulnerable topics.

Same core values but with a different lens.

LinkedIn is still my platform of choice.

I don't know why. It's my comfort zone. I'm more in the flow here.

Also on Threads and Instagram (if that's your thing, see comments).

Thank you a lot for being here. It means so much to me.

I just hope I serve you as well as possible.

A professional profile highlights Nicolas Cava, a fractional CTO with 3,000 followers, specializing in early-stage startups in Quebec.

Nobody tells you this about working across multiple clients:

You end up doing the same work over and over.

Audit a codebase. Write the same findings manually. Copy docs between platforms. Check the same 30 things you checked last time. Publish content. Sync files. Repeat.

The first few times, fine. By the tenth client, it starts to hurt.

So this week I got fed up and built a scanner that checks 106 items across security, code quality, and infrastructure. Automatically.

Runs in minutes on any repo I get dropped into.

Then I built a script that publishes my draft posts to Threads with one command. Then another one that syncs Markdown files to Notion and CSVs to Google Sheets. Because I was tired of copy-pasting between tools every single week.

None of these are products. They're not polished.

They're scripts I wrote because I got annoyed.

But here's what happened: each client engagement now starts faster.

The audit is more thorough than when I did it manually. The reports are consistent. The follow-ups don't get missed.

Six months of building small tools like this, and I'm operating at a speed I couldn't have planned for.

The compounding is wild. Every tool I build makes the next engagement a little better. And the one after that. And the one after that.

If you work across multiple companies, you're either doing the same manual work every time or you're building systems that carry forward.

There's no in-between.

A post highlights frustration with repetitive tasks, leading to spontaneous system creation out of necessity late at night.

Nobody should screen record product demos in 2026.

I did it four times for the same feature.

Every change meant re-recording the whole thing from scratch.

Same script. Same clicks. Same voiceover.

I'd spent more time making demo videos than building the feature they were demoing. So I wrote a script instead.

A Playwright spec that walks through 20 scenes in the app, paired with a narration JSON and an AI voice generator.

One command. 3:38 video. No re-recording.

When the UI changed two weeks later, I reran it.

New video in under a minute.

I've rerun it probably a dozen times since. The manual version took me half a day each time. Now it takes about 90 seconds.

I keep finding tasks I assumed had to be manual.

They never are.

Nicolas Cava stands in a well-lit room, looking contemplative. Artwork hangs on the wall behind him.

I'm terrible at what AI does effortlessly.

And AI is terrible at what comes naturally to me.

Building up from my post yesterday, this paradox reshapes how I think about my business and career.

Evolution spent millions of years perfecting our sensorimotor skills. But abstract reasoning? That's just a very small, recent layer on top of it.

In short:

AI is just way better at pattern matching, calculation, consistency.
Humans still win at ambiguity, physical adaptation, trust.

Yes. Robotics and multimodal AI are closing gaps very fast. But intelligence in messy environments? Still deeply hard for machines.

AI can fake empathy but can't read a room or deal with human politics.

So my taste and judgment remain mine.

When I have 50 AI-generated options, I'm the one who still decides.

I just came to the point that problem framing > problem solving now. AI already solves well-defined problems better than me.

Accountability stays with me.

No one accepts (for now) that AI decides when stakes are real.

What I'm convinced of now:

AI will commoditize most of my capabilities. The "when" it does it is just what matters. Every uniquely human claim eventually disappears.

But consciousness and trust? Still unsolved. Because trust is relational, not transactional. You need skin in the game.

The good news:

I believe commoditization doesn't kill our capabilities.

It elevates what's above them.

Examples: Photography didn't kill painting. Calculators didn't kill math.

So:

When execution is free, strategy becomes more valuable.
When strategy is automated, vision becomes more valuable.

And so on.

People who understand that will never be replaced by AI. Replacement will come by others who moved up the stack faster than us.

My takeaway:

Stay one layer above what AI just commoditized.

Stop asking, "Can AI do this?"
Ask, "How fast does this become a commodity?"

Then position yourself accordingly.

Nicolas Cava is featuring advice on leveraging personal capabilities in the age of AI, with a profile photo of him against a bright yellow background.

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