FR 🇬🇧

Turn your backend problems into solutions shipped to production

Understand, decide, deliver, hand over: on a focused backend problem or in a technical leadership role.

Tell me about your situation

12 years of experience · former Engineering Manager at Molotov · Co-founder of NuCorder

How I can help

Backend expertise

I take on a defined backend problem: understand what’s going on, decide the right approach with your team, carry it out, and hand it over.

Focused technical assessment

You know you need to act, but not yet in which direction.

I help you understand the situation, compare options, and reach a decision before committing to a major transformation.

Stabilize

Your backend has become slow, costly, or fragile.

We investigate what is driving the problem, measure what matters, then make the changes needed to bring the situation back under control.

Transform

The existing system has reached its limits.

Migration, partial rewrite, a new structure: I help you evolve the system progressively, without losing sight of production or hand-over to the team.

Build

You need to create a new backend capability.

I can start from the need, make the technical choices, and carry it through to production of a component your team can then evolve on its own.

Technical leadership

Fractional CTO

The problem no longer fits within a single, isolated technical project.

I can take on ongoing technical leadership: decisions, architecture, organization, and support for the team.

The goal is to provide the leadership the company needs today, without creating a lasting dependency on Cabestan.

Selected work

NuCorder

Co-founder & CTO

A remote music rehearsal SaaS that I joined as a consultant before becoming co-founder and CTO.

My work includes progressively migrating the backend from Java/Spring to Go , cutting CI from 30 minutes to 5, and building the Rust audio servers and production infrastructure.

  • Go
  • Rust
  • Vue.js
  • Pulumi
  • AWS / Scaleway
  • Grafana
https://www.nucorder.fr/

Wiremind — Eventori

Head of Software Engineering

Led software engineering for Eventori, with a seat on the executive committee.

I brought tech leads into estimation and preparation, shipped Apple Pay and Google Pay, and built a prototype letting the designer edit stadium plans herself after spotting an efficiency problem that had gone largely unnoticed.

  • Kubernetes
  • Bare metal
  • Online payments
  • Internal tooling
https://www.eventori.io/

Molotov

Tech lead & Engineering Manager

Over seven years at Molotov, I progressed from backend Go developer to tech lead and then manager of nine developers.

I worked on the infrastructure migrations to AWS and then GCP, and picked up an ephemeral-environments project from scratch. The Kubernetes prototype was adopted by the developers, then adapted for Fubo’s GCP/Kubernetes stack, where it stayed in use after I left.

  • Go
  • Micro-services
  • AWS / GCP
  • Kubernetes
https://www.molotov.tv/

If I had to sum up these many years under Stan's leadership, it would be: humanity. And that's saying something, because that quality is rare in a manager. I also learned a tremendous amount technically thanks to his skills and his ability to teach: always on the front line to support, teach, and share.

Arnaud, Backend developer at Molotov

Quadrille Ingénierie

Consulting engineer at Cerebris, primary technical contact

Direct technical contact for several media clients: scoping, trade-offs, delivery, and communication.

I delivered my first Go project as a prototype, worked on multicast/HLS solutions, built a test-management tool for Canal+, and modernized a CI pipeline from Bazaar/Jenkins to Git/GitLab CI.

  • Go
  • HLS / multicast
  • Node.js
  • CI/CD
  • GitLab

Other consulting engagements

Consulting engineer at Cerebris
Automated testing at Merck Millipore and work on a real-time online music studio at BleuSolid and Studio Sainte Marthe.
  • Automated testing
  • Real-time

About

Profile photo

I’m Stanislas Michalak. I have 12 years of experience in backend development and technical leadership, including five years leading engineering teams, in both French- and English-speaking environments.

I don’t just write code. I work with teams to understand the problem, navigate the trade-offs, own the technical decisions, and carry them through to production.

My core area of expertise is backend, with a strong specialization in Go, infrastructure, and production concerns. I’ve spent several years working on large-scale systems and maintained the Go framework Buffalo from 2017 to 2022.

What I aim to leave behind, above all, is understood decisions, operable systems, and a team more autonomous than when I arrived.

In my free time, I’m interested in cooking, music, robotics, and automation.

Why Cabestan?

Cabestan Technologies
The name Cabestan refers to the vertical winch sailors used to multiply their strength when raising an anchor or hauling lines. It’s an image for the role I aim to play alongside the teams I work with: adding technical leverage where it’s needed.

Field notes

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Contact

A project to kick off, a backend problem to solve, or a need for technical leadership?

Tell me what’s going on and why now. I’ll get back to you to say if, and how, I can help.

contact@cabestan.io Book a call