AI R&D Fullstack Engineer
Emmanuel Lion
I build products end to end, from architecture to production. Right now: self-hosted RAG systems, so companies can put their internal documents to work without handing them to a third party.
- documents indexed for the RAG engine
- 5,000+documents indexed for the RAG engine
- users of the intranet I helped build
- 250+users of the intranet I helped build
- of experience at BRL Ingénierie
- 4 yearsof experience at BRL Ingénierie
- faster CI/CD pipeline runs
- 4×faster CI/CD pipeline runs
About
A few words about me
I build products end to end, from technical architecture through to production deployment. What occupies me right now is self-hosted RAG systems: document ingestion, hybrid retrieval, models running locally.
The problem I find interesting is that of companies wanting to make use of their internal documents without handing them to a third-party provider. I spent the last four years as an apprentice engineer at BRL Ingénierie, where I designed an interactive mapping module, contributed to an intranet used by over 250 people, and automated CI/CD pipelines and GIS processing.
Alongside my engineering degree at IMT Mines Alès, I co-founded Buy&Rent, a SaaS for rental investment simulation. The thread running through all of it: look for what can be automated, and design systems that hold up over time, not just on demo day.
AI & RAG
Frontend
Backend
DevOps & Tools
Current work
What I'm working on
Taking RAG to production at BRL
Moving from prototype to production: intent routing, GPU-accelerated reranking, and continuous evaluation of answer reliability.
Benchmarking open-weight models
Comparing cost, latency and quality across self-hosted models, with a close eye on silent degradation in multilingual contexts.
First freelance assignments
Opening my own company: helping teams bring AI into their business processes, plus fullstack design and development of web applications.
Background
Professional experience
BRL Ingénierie
March 2022 – Present · 4 yrs 6 mos · Nîmes
AI R&D Fullstack Engineer
Sept. 2026 – Oct. 2027 · 13-month contract
- Design and productionization of generative AI solutions in sovereign, self-hosted environments, from upstream R&D through to production deployment.
- Self-hosted RAG architectures: hybrid dense and BM25 retrieval, GPU-accelerated reranking, and a multi-stage retrieval pipeline with LLM arbitration on borderline documents.
- Dynamic query routing based on intent (targeted lookup versus exhaustive enumeration) to guarantee answer completeness.
- Evaluation and benchmarking of self-hosted open-weight models: cost, latency and quality trade-offs, and diagnosis of silent degradation in multilingual contexts.
- Fullstack development of the surrounding applications and their production rollout: Docker containerization, workflow automation (n8n), CI/CD, and testing.
- Technology watch and rapid prototyping, turning R&D results into solutions usable across the organization.
Fullstack engineer apprentice
Sept. 2023 – Aug. 2026 · 3 years
- Designed and deployed a RAG system coupled with an open-source LLM, exposed through a web application, giving the company natural-language access to its entire internal document base. Pipeline and application built from scratch, with over 5,000 project reports indexed, focused on answer reliability and hallucination prevention.
- Fullstack development of Next.js / Strapi web applications: an interactive mapping module and dynamic charts, covered by unit tests and mocks.
- Productionization of CI/CD pipelines (builds, tests, merges, versioning), securing daily releases and reducing regressions.
- GIS automation: a shapefile and raster to TIFF conversion script that eliminated manual processing and cut rendering production time by a factor of four.
Web developer (work-study)
Aug. 2022 – Aug. 2023 · 1 yr 1 mo
- Built functional modules for an intranet deployed to over 250 employees (React, Spring Boot, PostgreSQL): consolidation of internal tools, a PDF newsletter reader, and a rebuild of the reprographics tool replacing a legacy internal system.
Web developer intern
March – July 2022 · 5 months
- Technical audit and scoping of the modernization of the legacy reporting platform: analysis of the existing system, identification of the modules to migrate, and prototyping of the first building blocks of the future intranet platform.
Co-founder & Fullstack Developer
Buy&Rent
Jan. 2025 – Aug. 2026
1 yr 8 mos
- Co-founder and frontend developer of Buy&Rent, a SaaS platform for rental investment simulation, started as a final-year project at IMT Mines Alès with a team of four and continued as a real product once we saw its potential.
- Built the entire frontend in Next.js and TypeScript.
- Integrated Stripe for subscription and payment management.
- Set up a blog and article system with Strapi.
- Worked with French public datasets (INSEE, DVF) for location scoring and tax regime comparison.
Volunteering
IT Projects Manager
BDE IMT Mines Alès — Cercle des élèves
May 2024 – May 2025
1 yr 1 mo · Alès
- Infrastructure administration: web hosting and Microsoft 365 account management.
- Internal application development (React Native) and oversight of the association's digital projects.
Deputy Secretary
EMA'IT
Apr. 2024 – May 2025 · 1 yr 2 mos
The school's IT association: a range of technical projects, plus access-badge and network management for the Alès student residence.
Treasurer
EMA'stro
May 2024 – Apr. 2025 · 1 year
The school's astronomy association: organizing events around the night sky, including stargazing evenings.
Achievements
Projects
Buy&Rent
Rental investment SaaS
Rental investment simulation platform enabling tax regime comparison, location scoring, and INSEE/DVF data analysis. Started as a final-year project at IMT Mines Alès and taken all the way to production, monetized through Stripe with content managed via Strapi.
Sovereign RAG engine
Internal document assistant, fully on-premise
Designed and built at BRL Ingénierie
Search and answer engine over BRL Ingénierie's document base: more than 5,000 project reports indexed and queryable in natural language. Answers systematically cite their sources, and abstain when the corpus cannot support one. Built for sensitive documents: everything runs on the company network, with a kill-switch that disables any external call.
BRL Ingénierie Intranet
Internal platform for 250+ employees
Lead developer (work-study)
Intranet application centralizing the company's internal tools: newsletter reader, reprographics tool, and business modules. Gradual replacement of a legacy system.
Mapping module
Geographic data visualization
Fullstack developer (apprenticeship)
Interactive mapping and visualization module with dynamic charts, integrated into BRL Ingénierie's Next.js / Strapi ecosystem. Complemented by a GIS automation script (shapefile and raster to TIFF) that cut rendering production time by a factor of four.
Claude Orchestra
Terminal multiplexer for AI coding agents
Personal open source project
Web interface to run and monitor multiple Claude Code instances in parallel. 100% local, zero telemetry.
Open source
What I publish
What I build outside of work.
Education
Academic background
2023 – 2026
IMT Mines Alès
Engineering degree in software development
Summer 2024
ČVUT Prague
Erasmus program in computer engineering
2022 – 2023
Aix-Marseille Université
Professional bachelor's in software design and development
2020 – 2022
Aix-Marseille Université
Two-year technical degree in computer science
Languages
Interests
Beyond the code
Automation
What drives me in tech: simplifying my life. My long-term goal is to automate everything so I can spend my days outside with the people I care about.
Sports
Daily weight training. Former competitive athlete in track & field (8 years, inter-regional level), French boxing (4 years), karate, swimming, volleyball and badminton.
Entrepreneurship
Passionate about building products. A few attempts, including Buy&Rent, a rental investment SaaS taken from idea to production between 2025 and 2026.
Science
Passionate about astronomy and quantum physics, I served as treasurer of my school's astronomy club. Curious about the big questions of the universe.
Entertainment
Competitive and adventure games. Also an avid manhwa reader and longtime anime fan.
Contact
Let's work together
Working at BRL Ingénierie, I also take on freelance assignments through my own company: bringing AI into business processes and fullstack web application development. Feel free to reach out to discuss a project or an opportunity.