Nicolas Besnard
Founding Engineer at TeamOut (YC W22)
Berlin, Germany
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolNicolas Besnard is a founding engineer with 13 years of hands-on experience building scalable web products and infrastructure from Berlin. He blends a Ruby-first backend expertise with practical React front-end work, frequent DevOps ownership (Terraform, Kubernetes, AWS) and occasional Swift tinkering. At startups and scale-ups—from Doctolib and Getaround to YC-backed TeamOut—he’s driven product development, CI/CD, and architecture improvements that helped systems handle high traffic and complex workflows. He has led teams and mentored juniors while improving performance-critical systems like SMS reminders for millions of patients and server-driven UI dashboards. An active contributor to the Rails ecosystem, he added username-based auth and session refactors to the widely used devise_token_auth project, demonstrating both product-minded and security-conscious engineering. Known for preferring pragmatic, test-driven refactors, he excels at turning ambiguous problems into maintainable systems.
13 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
EpitechGriffith College Dublin
Github Skills (10)
ruby-rails10
user-authentication10
authentication10
rails10
devise10
api10
ruby9
database-design9
testing8
sql7
Programming languages (18)
Github contributions (5)
lynndylanhurley/devise_token_auth
Jan 2015 - Feb 2015
Token based authentication for Rails JSON APIs. Designed to work with jToker and ng-token-auth.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:9 commits, 6 PRs, 132 comments in 15 days
Contributions summary:Nicolas contributed to the authentication functionality, specifically focusing on username login implementation, and email format validation. They modified the devise_token_auth gem by adding functionality to use username for authentication and updating the database schema and test configurations to support the feature. They also refactored the sessions controller and user model to improve code clarity and performance.
apitoken-based-authenticationtoken-basedrailstoken
owma/owma-api
May 2015 - Jun 2016
Contributions:135 pushes, 5 branches in 1 year
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