Bellevue, WA

Senior Software and Platform Engineer

Etienne Fokou

Founder of CIE LTD: I built and run Askel, a production job-search app, and InboxLink, its open-source Gmail connector.

I build reliable cloud platforms and developer tooling that reduce operational toil and help teams ship safely. Over 10+ years at Microsoft, Gartner, and Aflac, I've worked across distributed systems, infrastructure automation, observability, and production AI workflows on AWS, Azure, and GCP.

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Now: Building Askel at CIE LTD. Open to senior software, platform, SRE and production AI roles. (Oct 2026)

Portfolio
10+ YEARSPlatform and cloud engineering
3 CLOUDSAWS, Azure, and GCP
MULTI-TEAMPlatform delivery and reliability

Featured case studies

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Askel Job-Search Workspace

Deployed project

Askel Job-Search Workspace

Job seekers lose track of applications and interviews buried in their inbox. I built and run Askel, a production app that reads Gmail and Calendar, proposes board updates for review, and keeps every application, interview and contact in one place.

  • Live at getaskel.com with separate staging and production, 495 merged pull requests since Aug 2026
  • 3,467 automated tests, plus an email classifier checked against a set of 7,000 real recruiting emails
Next.jsTypeScriptReactAuth.jsNeon Postgres
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InboxLink Gmail Connector

Deployed project

InboxLink Gmail Connector

Every app that reads Gmail rebuilds the same OAuth, token refresh and message parsing. I built InboxLink, a standalone connector service with a typed SDK, so an app gets mail through one small API.

  • Open source, with @inboxlink/core and @inboxlink/sdk published on npm
  • Powers Askel's mail reading in production; 92 merged pull requests since Sep 2026
TypeScriptNode.jsNext.jsGmail APIOAuth 2.0
Read case studyCodeDemo
efokou-labs GitOps Platform

Public engineering portfolio

efokou-labs GitOps Platform

Scattered demos lived in one-off repos and cloud accounts. I built a reproducible lab with kind, Argo CD, Terraform modules, and sample workloads so any engineer can bootstrap a full stack from a fresh clone.

  • One kind cluster deploys Next.js, FastAPI, Postgres, and Redis through Argo CD overlays
  • Terraform modules run create-and-destroy tests in CI; AWS demos are torn down after each run
KubernetesArgo CDTerraformAWSGitHub Actions
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Agentic AI Platform

Reference architecture

Agentic AI Platform

LLM workflows needed grounding, guardrails, and ops visibility. I built orchestration for tool use, RAG, and telemetry wired into existing Prometheus and Grafana stacks.

  • Multi-step agents with tool routing and human-in-the-loop checkpoints for reliable completions
  • RAG and evaluation harnesses grounded answers in internal docs; latency and cost tracked in production
PythonLangChainOpenAI APIRAGVector DB
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Selected experience

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Founder and Owner · CIE LTD

2021 - Present · Bellevue, WA

Software company building Askel, a job-search workspace, and InboxLink, an open-source Gmail connector.

  • Built and run Askel (getaskel.com) end to end: product, Next.js and React Native apps, Neon Postgres, Vercel staging and production
  • Built InboxLink, a standalone Gmail connector service with a typed SDK published on npm, used by Askel in production
  • Keep releases safe with CI on every pull request: 3,467 automated tests, type checks, lint and production builds

Senior Software Engineer · Gartner

Jul 2025 - Present · Remote

Platform and backend delivery for enterprise research and data systems.

  • Designing distributed backend services for enterprise research platforms that support global product surfaces
  • Standardized CI/CD with GitHub Actions and Jenkins for faster time-to-production across multiple engineering teams
  • Implemented Terraform infrastructure as code across AWS and Azure for faster, repeatable environment provisioning

Focus areas

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Platform and Cloud Engineering

AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes

Infrastructure Automation

Terraform, Ansible, GitHub Actions, Jenkins

Reliability and Observability

Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, ELK Stack

Backend and Distributed Systems

Python, Go, Java, JavaScript / Node.js

Production AI Workflows

LLM orchestration, RAG, Observability for AI

Next step

Let's build something reliable together

Open to senior software, platform, SRE, cloud, and production AI roles. Reach out to discuss your team or a project.

Discuss a Platform Engineering Roleetiennefokou11@gmail.com

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