Richard Blondel
Crafting backend services with the end user in mind. Passionate about scalable systems, clean architecture, and the occasional mountain trail.
Richard Blondel
Senior backend engineer from Normandy, France, now based in Madrid, Spain. I focus on building distributed systems and cloud infrastructure that are reliable, observable, and easy to reason about.
I care about clean architecture and the product: software should solve real problems for real people. As LLMs take over more of the coding, the engineers who understand the problem deeply will stand out.
Outside of work
I spend time hiking, cooking, and slowly picking up new languages — human ones, for a change.
On Babbel's AI Conversation Partner feature, built a memory layer to enable ultra-personalized learning experiences by retaining and leveraging user data. Part of a 24/7 on-call roster and member of the Incident Management Board, fostering best monitoring and observability practices across the organisation.
Designed and delivered scalable backend services with an emphasis on event-driven architecture using SQS, EventBridge, and Kinesis. Led the architecture and development of Babbel's in-house push notification platform, delivering 100k+ notifications within a 5-minute window. Implemented high-impact features like streaks and streak challenges, increasing 1-week retention by 6%. Mentored a junior engineer.
Developed integrations for third-party tools like RingOver. Tracked and fixed bugs via server monitoring, answered customers' technical questions, and improved the code base with security patches, performance improvements, and coding standards.
# Open to new opportunities and interesting conversations.
Feel free to reach out — I respond within 48 hours.