Maël Valais
Ingénieur Logiciel Senior at Palo Alto Networks
Toulouse, Occitania, France
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMaël Valais is a senior software engineer based in Toulouse with 12 years of experience building cloud-native infrastructure, Kubernetes controllers, and networking software, primarily in Go. He blends pragmatic product thinking with technical leadership, coaching teams to focus on meaningful outcomes while keeping developers motivated and included. Maël has substantial open-source impact—especially on cert-manager—improving stability in ACME DNS01 providers and hardening AWS Route53 integrations while also contributing front-end and documentation enhancements to the project website. His background spans systems and control planes (Envoy, gRPC), operator/CRD development, and large-scale CI/CD and IaC practices across GKE, Terraform, and AWS. He holds a PhD in Artificial Intelligence and often bridges research rigor with production-grade engineering, for example translating formal ideas into usable tools and reproducible deployment pipelines. Notably, half his time at Jetstack was dedicated to community stewardship, where he helped drive CNCF graduation efforts and created welcoming contributor experiences.
12 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Artificial Intelligence, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Artificial Intelligence at Université Paul Sabatier Toulouse IIIScientific Baccalaureate, Physics, Scientific Baccalaureate, Physics at Lycée Saint-SerninMaster's degree, Operations Research, Master's degree, Operations Research at ENAC - Ecole Nationale de l'Aviation CivileBachelor's degree, MIAGE – Management Information Systems and Services, Bachelor's degree, MIAGE – Management Information Systems and Services at Université Toulouse 1 Capitole
English, French, Spanish, Khmer
Stackoverflow
78reputation
3kreached
4answers
1question
Github Skills (22)
kubernetes10
javascript10
testing10
nextjs10
go10
aws10
kubernetes-pods10
react10
cert-manager10
seo9
acme9
devops9
html9
dns8
css8
Programming languages (25)
Github contributions (5)
cert-manager/website
Dec 2020 - Oct 2022
Source code for the cert-manager.io website, including project documentation
Role in this project:
Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:358 reviews, 235 commits, 120 PRs in 1 year 10 months
Contributions summary:Maël primarily contributed to the website's front-end development, focusing on content and UI improvements. They modified the website's content to include CNCF project branding and made adjustments to the footer for better layout. Additionally, the user updated the website's configuration to correctly handle the site's base URL for the sitemap and the open graph tags. They also addressed issues with the title tags for better SEO performance.
cert-managercertkubernetesproject-documentation
cert-manager/cert-manager
Nov 2020 - Jan 2023
Automatically provision and manage TLS certificates in Kubernetes
Role in this project:Back-end & DevOps Engineer
Back-end & DevOps EngineerContributions:615 reviews, 217 commits, 99 PRs in 2 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Maël primarily contributed to improving the stability and reliability of the cert-manager project by addressing potential issues in the ACME DNS01 provider, specifically within the route53 implementation. Their work focused on identifying and mitigating bugs related to request IDs in the AWS SDK. Additionally, the user refactored the trigger controller, moving backoff logic to a unit-tested function and enhancing test coverage by adding test cases for various failure scenarios. They also streamlined several functions within the code base.
kubernetesletsencrypttlscertificatecrd
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