Alexandre Viau
VP Of Engineering at Debian
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAlexandre Viau is a seasoned engineering leader with 13 years of experience, currently serving as VP of Engineering at Flare in Montreal. He combines hands-on backend and DevOps expertise with product and team leadership, having progressed from lead developer to head of software and now VP within the same company. Alexandre has deep roots in open source—contributing to notable projects like Syncthing and golang/crypto—where he fixed build systems, dependency issues, and subtle OpenPGP key handling bugs that improved interoperability. His technical breadth spans distributed web crawlers, Kubernetes on GKE, storage integrations for Perkeep, and infrastructure automation for privacy-focused projects like Mailpile. A long-time Debian Developer and former free-software consultant, he brings strong systems, packaging, and release engineering skills often overlooked in modern app-centric resumes. He blends pragmatic engineering with governance experience, making him effective at scaling both teams and robust, production-grade infrastructure.
13 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
420.AA Computer Science Technology Computer Software Engineering, 420.AA Computer Science Technology Computer Software Engineering at College AhuntsicBachelor of Applied Science - BASc Information Technology, Bachelor of Applied Science - BASc Information Technology at UQAM | Université du Québec à MontréalBusiness Technology Certificate Computer/Information Technology Administration and Management, Business Technology Certificate Computer/Information Technology Administration and Management at École des sciences de la gestion (ESG UQAM)
English, French
Stackoverflow
21reputation
781reached
0answers
2questions
Github Skills (29)
openpgp10
python10
testing10
build-system10
apache10
cicd10
regular-expression10
go10
cryptography10
build-automation10
rewrite-rules10
devops10
cgi9
bash9
configuration-management9
Programming languages (29)
Github contributions (5)
perkeep/perkeep
Jan 2021 - Jul 2022
Perkeep (née Camlistore) is your personal storage system for life: a way of storing, syncing, sharing, modelling and backing up content.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Back-end Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:31 reviews, 61 commits, 222 PRs in 1 year 6 months
Contributions summary:Alexandre primarily focused on improving the build system and backend functionalities of the Perkeep project. Their contributions included refactoring build processes, migrating from GopherJS to goplusjs to support newer Go versions, and implementing various configurations for cloud replicas, specifically for S3, B2, and Google Cloud Storage. They also introduced features such as filtering by type when listing blobs and enhanced the project's CI/CD pipeline with more robust testing and improved documentation.
syncingstoringsharinglifestorage
syncthing/syncthing
May 2016 - Oct 2018
Open Source Continuous File Synchronization
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Back-end Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:15 commits, 12 PRs, 6 pushes in 2 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Alexandre contributed to the Syncthing project by addressing build and dependency issues, renaming binaries, and adding manpages. They modified build scripts and configuration files to improve the build process. The user also updated dependencies and added license information to the vendored Angular.js files.
synchronizationfile-synchronizationp2pcontinuouspeer-to-peer
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