Sébastien Launay

  • Canadian permanent resident.
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  • Last update:
    November 15, 2025.

Senior Staff Data Engineer

Passionate technical leader with 20+ years of distinguished experience driving large-scale data platform architecture and operational excellence across diverse industries. Deeply specialized in defining and scaling composable, resilient, and highly secure data platforms and modern data ingestion/activation systems.
Technical authority in Cloud Platform, pipeline optimization, stream processing, and embedding security/compliance into agile development processes. Driving force on tackling complex, distributed data challenges, simplifying architecture, and mentoring engineers to deliver high-quality, operationally sound software.

Professional Experience

Since May 2022 Senior Staff Data Engineer at 1Password in Vancouver, Canada
  • Leading the Data Platform team, defining the three year data and infrastructure vision and directly influencing the company-wide data strategy shifting organizational culture towards data-informed decision-making and self serve.
  • Driving the consolidation of high-volume data from disparate data sources to generate trusted and accurate insights while ensuring rigorous compliance for all downstream consumption and key business growth initiatives.
  • Cultivating platform engineering by coaching Senior Data Engineers to master operational excellence with a focus on simplicity and developer experience while providing system resiliency and reliability at scale.
2015 - 2022 Technical Lead - Reporting Data Platform at Cisco in Vancouver, Canada
  • Built and operated a highly available and fault tolerant reporting Data Platform for Cisco Umbrella from collection (37 global DCs) to storage (6 million events/s streamed at peak, 45 TiB per day) and analytics using AWS.
  • Mentored juniors on designing simple, secure and efficient quality streaming data pipelines.
2011 - 2015 Senior Software Engineer (Web, Java) at Sierra Wireless in Vancouver, Canada
2009 - 2011 Software Engineer and Open Source expert at Sierra Wireless in Toulouse, France
2005 - 2009 Technical expert, leader and trainer at Anyware Technologies in Toulouse, France
  • Product development, project management, expertise, training and pre-sales on Ametys (CMS and DMS solutions). Design and implementation of a HA web SSO system with load balancing.

Skills

Computer languages
  • Go, Python, Java, SQL, Bash.
Datastores
  • ClickHouse, S3, AWS DynamoDB, HBase, Redis.
  • MySQL, Postgres.
Data Processing
  • AWS Athena, dbt, Polars, Spark, Databricks, Flink.
Technologies
  • Iceberg, Kafka (Streams, Connect, Mirroring, Schema Registry), AWS Kinesis, SQS, SNS.
  • Terraform, Spacelift, AWS (ECS, Lambda, EC2, SSM), Docker, Ansible.
  • AWS (LB, Cloudfront, Route53, Cloud WAN).
  • Dagster, Prefect.
  • REST, Avro, Protobuf.
Security
  • TLS/X.509, AWS (KMS, IAM, ACM, PCA), OAuth, SSO (Okta, Jasig CAS).
  • SOC 2, FedRAMP.
Software engineering
  • Agile (Lean, Kanban, Scrum, XP), Design Patterns, K.I.S.S., YAGNI.
Tools
  • Neovim, Git, tmux.
  • Github, Gitlab, Jira.
  • Datadog, PagerDuty, Nagios.
  • Looker, Metabase.
Operating Systems
  • GNU/Linux (Ubuntu, Debian, Amazon Linux), MacOSX.
Languages
  • French (native speaker).
  • English spoken everyday by living in British Columbia.
  • Basic knowledge of Spanish.

Education

2002 - 2005 Engineer/Master's degree from INSA of Toulouse, France in Computer science
2000 - 2002 DUT in Computer science at the I.U.T. A of Toulouse, France

Interests

Hobbies: Technology Intelligence, Open Source contributor, Woodworking, Movies and TV shows.
Sports: Mountain Biking, Ski touring, Hiking.