Benoit Barthelet

benoit.barthelet@gmail.com • +33 698 609 237 • Paris, France

Hands-on software architect building AI applications and Python platforms for financial services. Former portfolio manager with 15+ years in capital markets and former maintainer of Uvicorn. Author of LouiseLM and acp-llm-adapter.

Experience

SFJ Technologies LLC − Chief Architect and Head of Engineering − Sep 2018 – Present

Fintech producing bankruptcy and fraud-risk signals from proprietary financial data.

AI & LLM Engineering

• Architected and shipped an internal assistant for querying proprietary financial data in natural language. Built a RAG pipeline with embeddings, pgvector and hybrid retrieval, using LiteLLM for cost-aware routing and fallback across hosted and self-hosted models.
• Established LLM evaluation pipelines: prompt versioning, A/B testing of model responses, retrieval quality metrics, and hallucination guardrails for finance-domain outputs.

Platform Engineering

• Architected the FastAPI / PostgreSQL / arq backend, with GitLab CI/CD and infrastructure as code via Terraform.
• Designed Excel User-Defined Functions to expose platform capabilities in users’ spreadsheet workflows.
• Built ingestion and transformation pipelines turning raw accounting data into ML-based risk signals.
• Owned infrastructure, security posture, data residency, and delivery.

Sullivan Cloud − Architect − Sep 2017 – June 2025

Leading advisory and system integrator for digital transformation of legacy workflows. Designed and developed cloud migration tooling on GCP.

• Built automation tools for GSuite migration across manufacturing and professional-services clients.
• Reviewed and hardened cloud infrastructure for a broad range of industries.

Generali Investments Europe − Portfolio Manager − Dec 2010 – Sep 2017

Actively managed a multibillion portfolio of derivative-based assets and drove the technology transformation of the front-office toolchain.

• Created insurance-specific investment strategies on European fixed-income derivatives.
• Developed in-house pricing and risk-modelling software, replacing black-box vendor systems with auditable, self-built tools.
• Automated end-to-end front-office processes — from trade capture to risk reporting — giving the desk a speed advantage in opportunistic markets.

Lazard Freres Gestion − Portfolio Manager − Jun 2005 – Dec 2010

Created the structured-product and Fund-of-Hedge-Funds desk for ultra-high-net-worth clients.

• Defined product strategy, pricing, and marketing for a new business line.
• Acted as principal architect for the technology platform supporting the full product lifecycle.

SGAM Alternative Investments − Fund derivatives trader − Mar 2001 – Jun 2005

Pioneered a new market in hedge-fund derivatives, leading to the first billion-euro capital-guaranteed mutual fund in Europe.

• Managed a €1B book of highly illiquid fund derivatives.
• Built pricing models and an integration platform that automated workflow across sales, middle-office, back-office, and IT.

Selected projects

AI & LLM

LouiseLM

Built a Neovim client for AI coding agents, with multiple sessions, streamed tool activity, editor context sharing, and permission review. Uses the Agent Client Protocol (ACP) to connect the editor to independently configured agents.

acp-llm-adapter

Built a Rust agent harness connecting DeepSeek, GLM, and Groq to ACP-capable editors. Supports streaming, tool execution, MCP integration, permission controls, and session persistence.

Local LLM infrastructure

Designed and maintain a home lab with self-hosted GitLab and CI/CD for personal services. Run open-weight models on consumer GPU hardware using vLLM, Ollama, and llama.cpp to evaluate models, retrieval strategies, and agent workflows.

Infrastructure & Open Source

Uvicorn

Former maintainer of the Python ASGI server built on uvloop and httptools.

Litestar

Contributor to the ASGI framework, with experience across the Python async stack (msgspec, uvloop, httptools).

Education & certifications

Ecole Supérieure de Commerce de Paris — MSc Finance, Derivatives Trading

Thesis: pricing of PCS options (Property-Claim Services) and impact on reinsurance natural-disaster markets

OSCP — Offensive Security Certified Professional (OS-101-035377)

GitLab Certified Associate

Associate Google Cloud Engineer

Skills

• Languages — Python (expert, asyncio), JavaScript / React, C# (Excel-DNA), Rust (acp-llm-adapter).
• AI & LLM — RAG, LiteLLM, model routing and fallback, prompt engineering, agent workflows, evaluation and guardrails, ACP, vLLM, Ollama, llama.cpp.
• Infrastructure — AWS, GCP, Terraform, Docker/Podman, GitLab CI/CD, Debian.
• Data — PostgreSQL (advanced), pgvector, async migrations, data pipelines.
• Security — Threat modelling for web applications and APIs; prompt injection awareness.
• Spoken languages — French (native), English (fluent), Chinese (beginner).

Personal

Gardening • Ultratrail