{ "$schema": "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jsonresume/resume-schema/v1.0.0/schema.json", "basics": { "name": "Nicolas Ha", "label": "Senior freelance software engineer", "email": "nicolas@klar.im", "url": "https://nicolas-ha.com", "summary": "Senior freelance software engineer, 12+ years, now building AI systems: small specialized AI models, agentic orchestration and workflows, RAG, MCP tooling, agent memory. I have led a backend team on a pipeline serving 1.3B views a month, helped stand up new teams inside a bank going for its licence. I have shipped several products from 0 to 1, the latest Klar, an AI spam filter for Apple Mail.", "location": { "countryCode": "FR" }, "profiles": [ { "network": "GitHub", "url": "https://github.com/nha", "username": "nha" }, { "network": "Stack Overflow", "url": "https://stackoverflow.com/u/1327651", "username": "1327651" }, { "network": "LinkedIn", "url": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicolasha/", "username": "nicolasha" } ] }, "work": [ { "name": "Klar (klar.im)", "position": "Founder & Lead AI Engineer", "location": "Remote, France", "startDate": "2026-01", "summary": "In production on the App Store: on-device, privacy-preserving spam filter for Apple Mail.", "highlights": [ "Trained the classifier in Python: a four-class head on a frozen XLM-RoBERTa encoder, quantised to run on the Mac's own GPU in under 50ms a message, with no network access.", "Built the C++17 engine it runs on (llama.cpp/GGML) behind a stable C API, with Node and Swift bindings, a Postfix milter and Docker end-to-end tests.", "AI tooling: custom memory and retrieval (MCP, LangChain, RAG, agent hooks and skills)." ], "url": "https://klar.im" }, { "name": "Narval (GM NFT)", "position": "Staff developer", "location": "Paris, France", "startDate": "2025-06", "summary": "Joined a company of 4 as an early engineer, before any product existed.", "highlights": [ "Built custodian integrations (BitGo, Zodia) enabling institutional custodians to access DeFi (Aave staking, TON transactions), with GNAP/OAuth authn/authz on an OPA policy engine.", "Built transaction decoding/proxy infrastructure for on-chain transaction validation (EIP-7730)." ], "endDate": "2025-12" }, { "name": "Griffin Bank (BaaS)", "position": "Senior software engineer", "location": "London, United Kingdom", "startDate": "2022-04", "summary": "Built platform components a UK banking licence depended on, in a heavily regulated environment.", "highlights": [ "Led several new platform initiatives end-to-end, and helped build out new engineering teams as the org scaled toward its licence.", "Implemented secure admin authorization, a webhooks architecture, and passkey-based multi-factor authentication.", "Designed the queuing and processing systems, audit logging, scheduled-job infrastructure, and HTTP message signing behind it." ], "endDate": "2025-06" }, { "name": "TurtleQueue (SaaS)", "position": "Independent Developer", "location": "London, United Kingdom", "startDate": "2019-09", "summary": "Led development of TurtleQueue, a message broker SaaS platform compatible with Apache Pulsar and Apache Kafka.", "highlights": [ "Took the product 0-to-1: designed and built the entire technology stack from scratch; secured R&D tax incentives.", "Built a proxy speaking the Apache Kafka and Apache Pulsar wire protocols, so existing client applications connected without changes.", "Hired and led a small team of contractor engineers to scale delivery.", "Ran freelance contract engineering for MailOnline in parallel." ], "endDate": "2022-04" }, { "name": "MailOnline (Media)", "position": "Backend team lead software engineer", "location": "London, United Kingdom", "startDate": "2016-08", "summary": "Promoted from Senior Engineer to Backend Team Lead, managing a team of experienced developers.", "highlights": [ "Architected and scaled the core publishing pipeline to 1.3B views a month.", "Implemented ad placement that increased revenue; delivered real-time analytics that reduced feedback cycles." ], "endDate": "2019-07" }, { "name": "Go Find It (Startup mobile apps)", "position": "Software engineer", "location": "Paris, France", "startDate": "2015-05", "summary": "Built a full-stack mobile CMS for luxury hotels.", "highlights": [ "Ran the pipeline from development through DevOps to App Store publishing for a team of 10 mobile developers, with Python SSH deployment tooling." ], "endDate": "2016-04" }, { "name": "Apizee (Startup web telecommunications)", "position": "Software engineer", "location": "Lannion, France", "startDate": "2014-03", "summary": "First backend engineer hire.", "highlights": [ "Took a prototype 0-to-1: connectors bridging WebRTC customers with legacy phone systems (Alcatel-Lucent SIP IMS, RCS), and the measurement tooling for Orange Labs that won a multi-year contract with Orange.", "Technology demoed at Mobile World Congress Barcelona, on HP's booth." ], "endDate": "2015-05" }, { "name": "Siléane (Robotics SMB)", "position": "Intern", "location": "France", "startDate": "2012", "summary": "", "highlights": [ "Prototyped 0-to-1 a controller for a Fanuc industrial robotic arm driven by Microsoft Kinect vision, so non-technical users could program movement paths by gesture." ], "endDate": "2012" }, { "name": "Dassault Aviation (equipments division)", "position": "Intern", "location": "France", "startDate": "2010", "summary": "", "highlights": [ "Developed an automated debugging bench to stress-test military avionics flight-control circuit boards, enabling 24-hour testing cycles that cut testing time by 50%." ], "endDate": "2010" } ], "education": [ { "institution": "ENSSAT", "area": "Master's degree in computer science", "startDate": "2011", "endDate": "2014", "location": "Lannion, France", "summary": "Student representative. Erasmus exchange in Germany, with classes taught in German." }, { "institution": "Edinburgh Napier University", "area": "Bachelor of Engineering in Electronic and Computer Engineering", "startDate": "2010", "endDate": "2011", "location": "Edinburgh, United Kingdom", "summary": "Coursework included C, embedded/real-time systems design, and state machines." } ], "skills": [ { "name": "AGENTIC AI & LLM SYSTEMS", "keywords": [ "LangChain / LangGraph", "MCP servers and tools", "RAG and hybrid search", "Agent memory", "Multi-agent workflows", "Agent evaluation and benchmarking", "Embeddings and local inference (ONNX, llama.cpp)", "Vector search" ] }, { "name": "LEADERSHIP", "keywords": [ "Technical leadership", "Leading and mentoring engineers", "Standing up new teams", "Hiring and running contractors", "Architecture ownership" ] }, { "name": "PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES", "keywords": [ "Python", "C++", "Clojure", "TypeScript", "JavaScript" ] }, { "name": "PLATFORMS & INFRASTRUCTURE", "keywords": [ "Node.js", "React", "Docker", "Kubernetes", "AWS", "CI/CD", "Git/GitLab" ] }, { "name": "DATA & MESSAGING", "keywords": [ "PostgreSQL", "Redis", "SQLite", "FoundationDB", "ElasticSearch", "MongoDB", "Kafka", "Pulsar", "RabbitMQ" ] }, { "name": "HOW I WORK", "keywords": [ "Benchmark-driven iteration", "Scalable, reliable production systems", "Testing (unit, integration, e2e, generative)" ] } ], "languages": [ { "language": "French", "fluency": "Native speaker" }, { "language": "English" } ], "meta": { "canonical": "https://nicolas-ha.com/resume.json", "version": "v1.0.0" } }