Jean-Luc Vaillant

Current

Co-Founder & CTO at LinkedIn

Past

VP Engineering at LinkedIn
Director of Engineering - Video Services at Logitech
Director of Software Development at Spotlife, Inc

Director of Technology at Socialnet.com
Engineer Manager at Fujitsu
Director of Server Development at Sophis
Research Project Lead at CNET - France Telecom Research
Software Engineer (Self-employed)

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Education

Ecole nationale supérieure des Télécommunications

Recommended

4 people have recommended Jean-Luc

Connections

307 connections

Industry

Internet

Websites

In my free time...

Jean-Luc Vaillant’s Summary

15+ years of software engineering experience.. from mini systems in the early 80s to distributed UNIX systems in the late 90s. Last 10 years in various management positions, in startups as well as large public companies. Most attracted by fast paced projets where design, architecture and attention to detail have a real positive impact on the business.

Jean-Luc Vaillant’s Specialties:

Team creation and organization, scalable server systems, web consumer sites, operations and software management, Java, UNIX, C++, Oracle

Jean-Luc Vaillant’s Experience

Co-Founder & CTO

LinkedIn

(Privately Held; 51-200 employees; Internet industry)

April 2007 — Present (2 years 8 months)

Responsible for architecture and infrastructure development. My primary task is to ensure the site will stay up and responsive when we reach 100M+ users.
VP Engineering

LinkedIn

(Privately Held; 51-200 employees; Internet industry)

January 2003 — April 2007 (4 years 4 months)

Cofounded the company. Led all aspect of engineering (application development, technology and operations) for 4 years. Went from zero to 10 millions users, 200+ millions pages views/month, 35 engineers and most importantly, reached profitability!
Director of Engineering - Video Services

Logitech

(Public Company; 1001-5000 employees; LOGI; Computer Hardware industry)

April 2002 — January 2003 (10 months)

Joined Logitech after the acquisition of Spotlife. Managed transition of previous products lines into the Video Division strategy, project manager for Quicksend, a photo sharing service. In charge of the quite popular IM Companion product, a P2P video application for instant messaging. Responsible for the technical integration (from early discussion to contract signing) of the IM Video technology with the current and next generation of Microsoft MSN instant messenger.
Director of Software Development

Spotlife, Inc

(Internet industry)

June 2001 — April 2002 (11 months)

Brought Spotlife new product line, Stored Video Service to market, as an integrated feature of Yahoo Mail. Did a lot of reorganization within the engineering division: merged client (Windows) and server (SUN) groups, introduced fast iterative developement processes along product lines, organized bug tracking system, build process, specification cycle, etc.
Did quite a bit of architecture and design optimizations too... Once an engineer, always an engineer...
Director of Technology

Socialnet.com

(Internet industry)

May 1998 — May 2001 (3 years 1 month)

In charge of all the core components of the Socialnet software as well as System and Network Operations. Particularly proud of the matching engine (still the best dating matching system IMHO) as my team and I managed to optimize an algorithm fundamentally n-square to sustain a growth up to 2 millions members.
Socialnet got acquired by Matchnet where I joined a VP of Development for a few months...
Worked really hard at Socialnet... learned a lot too, especially about running a popular comsumer site on early Java technogy...
Engineer Manager

Fujitsu

(Public Company; 5001-10,000 employees; Internet industry)

October 1996 — April 1998 (1 year 7 months)

First position in the Silicon Valley... Started as senior server engineer on the (now defunct) WorldsAway project, still one of my favorite project (who has not dreamed of creating a brand new world?). Did a lot of optimisations, refactoring (C++, TCL,), prototyping (Java) before becoming the manager of the group. Left before things went bad (financially) to join Reid and the newly founded Socialnet.com
Director of Server Development

Sophis

(Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Financial Services industry)

March 1995 — September 1996 (1 year 7 months)

Responsible for the backend processing of all applications and their integration with the customers legacy system.
Directed the migration of internal and customers servers to SUN and Oracle.
Redesigned the daily remote data distribution process, improving its reliability by 800%.
Designed and directed the implementation of a high performance multithreaded financial feed integrator in C++
Research Project Lead

CNET - France Telecom Research

(Government Agency; 10,001 or more employees; Telecommunications industry)

September 1992 — March 1995 (2 years 7 months)

In charge of delivering methodologies and tools to design, validate and manage OSI object oriented network management models.
Established requirements for the modeling tool suite by interviewing internal end users and researching existing commercial methodologies and tools.
Presented a formal Z specification of the GDMO object protocol at ECOOP 95.
Designed and taught the first GDMO/CMIP course to the engineers of France Telecom.
Implemented a fully operational 3 tiers web application for managing GDMO models.
Software Engineer

Self-employed

(Self-Employed; Myself Only; Computer Software industry)

June 1984 — August 1992 (8 years 3 months)

Various contracting positions for small and large companies including Bell Labs (USA), Thomson CSF (France), PrologIA (France)...
Most of the work revolved about desiging and optimizing compilers, image and language processing and telecommunication systems.