Xavier Crochet

mail at xcrochet dot net · LinkedIn

I’m a backend and distributed-systems engineer in Zurich. I build large systems that stay maintainable after I move on: authentication and authorization platforms, event-driven data pipelines, and integrating services other teams own. Go for the last six years, Ruby on Rails before and alongside it, on Linux and Google Cloud. I ship in small increments and keep recovery fast. Most of the work is cross-team and remote, so the writing matters as much as the code. Belgian, in Switzerland since 2016.

Besides the features I am asked to build, I fix the gaps I find in the platform: internal tooling, a reusable worker pool library, observability across services. That often means changing components other teams own. I collaborate with them and adopt their way of working. I ask why things work the way they do. Sometimes there’s a good reason, and then I leave it alone. All of it without affecting what I committed to deliver.

BLP Digital

BLP Digital automates enterprise ERP processes with AI for 20’000+ daily users across 40+ countries. I joined to support engineering as it scales. I work across the core platform: the workflow API, the storage layer, observability, and identity. I also make good engineering practice automatic across the department, with agentic coding tools and MCP servers.

Futurae

Five years at Futurae, which builds strong customer authentication and fraud detection for banks and insurers. Principal engineer in 2025, across the backend, mobile, data, and QA teams.

• Broke down the wall between the data science and backend teams. The data they worked from was hours out of date and pieced together after the fact.
• Built the first version of the pipeline that replaced it. Go workers published events to Pub/Sub, Spark on Dataproc transformed them, and an API served the refined data back out. It became the basis for real-time fraud detection and risk-based authentication.
• Led the split of the backend into smaller services as it grew.
• Drove the move of the old Rails application to a backend-for-frontend architecture, with federated OpenID Connect authentication.
• Moved authorization from group-based to attribute-based.

Appway

Four years building applications for individual banks on Appway, a JVM-based process-orchestration platform later acquired by FNZ.

• Built KYC and identity and access management applications, and connected them to each bank’s core banking and directory systems.
• Built the CI/CD for the platform itself, which had none. It started as one customer project. Other teams reused it and it became part of the core platform.

Studies

Computer science at the Université catholique de Louvain, specializing in networks and security. Finished in 2014 with a thesis in software development.

Outside work

I run my own infrastructure at home: a fully declarative Kubernetes cluster on NixOS. It hosts what I would otherwise rent: media, photos, documents, password storage, git hosting, monitoring, local LLM inference. I read about 100 books a year. I shoot analog street photography around Zurich and develop the film myself. I listen to a lot of music, across most styles, and own more than 2’000 CDs: what I am listening to.