Lemuel Donto — Lead Software Engineer

Real-time. Distributed. In production. From architecture to the team that ships it.

Lemuel Donto

“We are made of star-stuff.”Carl Sagan

01Who I am

About

Software Engineer and Dev Lead with 4+ years designing, building, and operating distributed microservices in production.

I take an idea and turn it into a product that runs — from the interface to the infrastructure, built to stay reliable once real users are on it.

Right now I’m building GLS’s connected-locker platform — I design and develop a large part of it. I’m also part of the small team building GLS France’s AI foundation. On the side, I launch my own products — nothing drives me more than turning an ambitious idea into something real.

4+: Years of experience
5: Engineers led
2: Ventures live (MVP)
2: Cloud platforms (AWS · Azure)

How I work

I own a product end to end — from architecture to production — and I stay accountable until it runs, at scale, for real users.

What I bring

Technical leadership

I support a 5-engineer team, own the architecture, and align API contracts across companies.

Distributed systems at scale

Real-time, event-driven platforms — Apache Kafka, WebSocket — engineered for production scale.

Founder’s mindset

I don’t just ship features — I architect and launch my own ventures end-to-end.

Reliability & ownership

Observability, infrastructure-as-code and CI/CD — I own what I run in production.

Quality-driven

BDD, end-to-end and integration testing across polyglot, multi-service environments.

Diplôme d’ingénieur — Komlan Lemuel Donto, École Polytechnique Universitaire, Université Côte d’Azur

Education

Engineering Degree (MSc level) in Computer Science — Diplôme d’Ingénieur

Polytech Nice Sophia · Université Côte d’Azur

2019 – 2022 · Sophia Antipolis, France

Languages

EweNative
FrenchBilingual
EnglishProfessional working

02Trajectory

Experience

Four years building and running distributed systems in production — for a European parcel network and for international air freight.

GLSCurrent

Oct 2025 – Present Toulouse, France

Lead Software Engineer (Dev Lead)

GLS · General Logistics Systems

GLS is one of Europe’s largest parcel networks. My team builds the platform that plugs third-party locker providers into its Out-of-Home delivery network — a polyglot, event-driven system running on AWS.

5 engineers led~350K parcels / dayAI platform teamEmail-campaign UI redesigned

What I did

Lead and support a team of 5 engineers building a real-time microservices platform (Go, AWS) that integrates third-party lockers from multiple providers into GLS’s Out-of-Home (OOH) network.
Part of the small team building GLS France’s AI foundation — a shared platform of skills, agents and AI tooling that assists developers, product owners and stakeholders day to day.
Co-design the service architecture and AWS infrastructure with GLS’s solution architect and tech lead, and serve as primary engineering contact for external locker providers, aligning API contracts and event flows across companies.
Build and maintain end-to-end and integration test suites in Java with Cucumber and Gherkin (BDD), validating behaviour across a polyglot, multi-service environment.
Own platform reliability and infrastructure — Grafana observability for service health and real-time event flows, AWS infrastructure as code with Terraform, and CI/CD build/test/deploy automation.
Led GLS’s recipient-notification overhaul — migrated 2,000+ lines of legacy HTML email to MJML templating and redesigned the UI of its email campaigns into responsive, maintainable templates.

GoAWSMicroservicesReal-TimeTerraformGrafana

Air France

Oct 2022 – Aug 2025 Toulouse, France

Full-Stack Software Engineer

Air France · via ASTEK Technology

Air France Cargo moves freight that must clear customs in every country it touches. I built and maintained the microservices behind those declarations and their compliance checks.

~3 years on the platformRule-based alert engine shippedOn-prem → Azure migration

What I did

Built and maintained Java / Spring Boot microservices for international customs freight declarations and compliance verification, handling complex business rules, error management, and XML message flows (XFWB, ENS, IATA) over Kafka and ActiveMQ — and developed the Angular front-ends of the customs communication tools.
Shipped a rule-based alert engine that analyses XML freight documents and flags cases for manual review, with full traceability of automatic freight blockages.
Migrated on-premises services to Microsoft Azure (App Services, Functions, Service Bus), cutting provisioning time by 50%, and tuned Kafka to raise throughput by 60%.

JavaSpring BootMicroservicesAzureXML / XFWB

03Selected work

Projects

Founder at heart, engineer in execution. I start a lot — I only keep what reaches production. Here are two.

01Mar 2024 – Present

Asiganme

West-Africa e-commerce marketplace

The problem

E-commerce in West Africa is held back by two things: payments — most buyers use mobile money, not cards — and product search that doesn’t match how people actually shop.

Status

In active development · team of 3 · buyer app + seller & staff web apps

What I built

Building a microservices marketplace for West Africa (Spring Boot/Java, Flask/Python) across three clients — a React Native buyer app and React web apps for sellers and staff.
Built the AI layer end to end: natural-language product search and a conversational shopping assistant (Python AI services + Elasticsearch), automated moderation that flags non-compliant listings, and seasonal demand analysis that surfaces the right products and promos ahead of time.
Integrated mobile-money and card payments — Ecobank API for mobile money, PayPal for cards — matching how West-African buyers actually pay.
Own the DevOps and infrastructure: the platform runs fully on AWS (SNS, SQS, S3), containerized with Docker and Docker Compose, and provisioned as infrastructure-as-code with Terraform.
Built the CI/CD pipelines for automated build, test and deploy, backed by an end-to-end test suite in JUnit, Cucumber and Gherkin (BDD).

Spring BootFlask / PythonReact NativeReactElasticsearchAWS (SNS · SQS · S3)DockerTerraform

02Apr 2025 – Present

Fintech Lending App

Short-term lending — installment credit

The problem

Short-term credit is hard to access without a formal credit history — a lender needs another way to judge solvency, and a reliable way to verify who they are lending to.

Status

In active development · team of 3 · loans repaid over 3–4 monthly installments

What I built

Architected the short-term lending app as microservices (Spring Boot) — loans repaid over 3 to 4 monthly installments.
Wrote the credit-scoring algorithm that judges a borrower’s solvency when there is no formal credit history to rely on.
AI identity verification: biometric face and ID-document analysis (Smile ID) for a KYC we can actually trust.
AI income analysis: payslips and proof-of-income documents read and extracted automatically (AWS Textract), then fed into the scoring.
Integrated payments end to end — mobile money through the Ecobank API, cards through Stripe and PayPal — for paying the loan out and collecting each monthly installment.
Own the DevOps and infrastructure on AWS: containerized with Docker Compose, provisioned as infrastructure-as-code with Terraform.

Spring BootSmile ID (KYC)StripePayPalAWS TextractDocker ComposeTerraform

04The stack

Skills

The stack I design, build and operate with — day to day, in production.

Languages

Go
Java
JavaScript
TypeScript
Python
C
SQL

Backend & Architecture

Microservices
REST APIs
Event-Driven Architecture
Distributed Systems
Spring Boot
Spring Cloud
Spring Security
Node.js
Apache Kafka
WebSocket (STOMP)

Cloud

AWS
EC2
S3
ACM
VPC / VPN
Textract
Microsoft Azure

DevOps & IaC

Terraform
Infrastructure as Code
Docker
Kubernetes
GitLab CI
GitHub Actions
Bamboo
Bitbucket

Frontend

Angular
React
React Native
Ionic
HTML
CSS
MJML

Observability & Testing

Grafana
Monitoring & Alerting
Cucumber
Gherkin
BDD
JUnit
E2E & Integration

Databases

PostgreSQL
MySQL
MongoDB
Oracle

I build real-time distributed systems. The one I lead moves 350,000 parcels a day.