Christophe MontagneInterim CTO · Advisory

Interim CTO · Mission-critical software · In software since 1986

An engineer at heart, a CTO by trade.

Forty years from writing code to the executive committee, without ever leaving the technology.

Today I am an interim CTO, brought in when a company changes state: a product generation to move, an organisation to rebuild, investors to convince, and now generative AI.

Core competencies

An engineer who stayed close to the technology

I started in electrical engineering and veered to software engineering, with a master's degree from the Polytechnic University of New York. I have worked hands-on through every technology shift since 1983, and I still take and own architecture decisions.

  1. 1983Speech recognition on a Motorola 68000 with less than 256 KB of memory.
  2. 1990sClient-server and development tools, building products for a software tools vendor and its clients.
  3. 2000sJava and the web: medical device software migrated to JEE; a product suite replatformed to the web.
  4. 2010sThe cloud: a cloud-native, API-first generation on AWS, and customers' database costs cut by up to 60%.
  5. 2020sGenerative AI: building systems with it myself, and helping executives decide where it creates value and where it does not.
  • Software architecture
  • Cloud-native on AWS
  • Web-first applications
  • Regulated delivery: IEC 62304, FDA 510(k)
  • Scrum, PMBOK, CMMI
  • AI-assisted development

Career

From development engineer to interim CTO

From my very first CTO role, the job was change: a product generation to replace, an organisation to recover, a market to open. I was a named CTO doing an interim CTO's work, so in 2021 I made it official. Change is what I thrive on.

  1. 1986Development engineer, then eleven years at a software tools vendor, from engineer to project manager.
  2. 2000Senior software architect and project manager at IBM Global Services: a sovereign land registry, e-commerce, medical software.
  3. 2004CTO, and straight into a transition: a legacy product suite to move to the web, and FDA clearance to win for the US market.
  4. 2008CTO of a company asleep on past success: R&D rebuilt, Scrum adopted, a new product shipped in 14 months instead of 36.
  5. 2013Founder: co-founded Jouleco, my own firm, to build public-health software now in production in Senegal and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
  6. 2015CTO for a new technology cycle: a cloud-native generation defined, and a majority acquisition by a global investor.
  7. 2021Interim CTO, officially: turnarounds, product generations, investor due diligence and now generative AI, each ending with a handover to a permanent CTO.

The full career, in the CV →

Where to go next