Meet 10 Women of vpTech

I do a job that I love. I do it because of some people that I met, heard about or read from and that inspired me to do so.

I want my daughter and every young lady out there to have the opportunity to be inspired like I’ve been. This is why I have decided to interview some of the great women that surround me.

Despite coming from different backgrounds, these women share stories that resonate with each other, striking many of the same themes: overcoming imposter syndrome, finding a career in tech via circuitous paths, and grabbing an opportunity on the fly. With no further ado meet 10 amazing Women of vpTech!

In alphabetical orders:

1. Ambre Gauci-Dalle, Developer @ the Innovation team

“In 2013, I was preparing for the entrance exam to become chief officer, in the French military Police. I was living in a troop headquarters. Meanwhile my brother had integrated the first promotion of school 42 in Paris. As 42 has a demanding program, each time I wanted to hang out with my brother, I had to go there. And I must confess that I loved the energy the place had. One day, on a bet with my brother, I tried the 42 1st phase of the entrance exam… and I passed.

A few weeks later, I injured myself and I had to abandon my military dream. I then decided to become a criminal lawyer. However, before the university year started, I had 1 month to spare so I went into the 2nd phase of 42 entrance exam. I worked like crazy and I loved it so much that when summer was over… I never went to law school.

Today, when I look back, I am amazed how fast I’ve switched from being afraid of the whole tech complexity to being fascinated by it. Nowadays, we are so much surrounded by technology that having even a basic understanding framework is extraordinarily fulfilling.”

2. Arij Saidane, Software developer @ Navigation team

Arij grew up in Ksar Hellal, 2 hours south of Tunis. No one in her family background had an engineer profile. However, she was good with math so she decided to be the first to pursue studies in that direction.

At age 24, while finishing her software engineering school, she wanted to experience living abroad. She applied in India, France and the US and landed her first job as a C# developer at Ecovadis. That was her very first time in France.

She absolutely loved her first job and her parisian life but after 4 years she felt that her learning curve was slowing down. She had to move away from her comfort zone and that’s why she got in vpTech. Her product was totally different as she shifted from a B2B product towards a B2C one, where challenges are vastly different.

As part of the navigation team, in charge of all homepages and sales pages, she has to handle a lot of performance related issues in order to absorb the millions of simultaneous users landing on all the Veepee channels.

Arij went through an amazing journey to reach her current position, and yet she tells it like it is any regular story. Such calm and humility says a lot about oneself.

Right now, Arij just loves her work, her workplace, her colleagues and all the challenges she has to crack. She just wants to enjoy it for the time being. Carpe Diem.

3. Betty Moreschini, Data Engineer @ Forecasting team

Betty grew up in Goussainville, outside of Paris. At age 19, while in prep school she got her first computer science class. Even if it was still very theoretical programming languages, it clicked right away. “After years of studying Maths, it all suddenly made sense and on top of that, it was fun.”

Prior to vpTech, Betty experienced living abroad, at Edinburgh (Scotland) and Gdansk (Poland), where she worked for Amazon on Alexa. She then move back to Paris for a tech startup. While She acknowledges that both were great human experiences that shaped her into a “real developer”, she found both jobs to not be fulfilling enough.

Hence, in early 2017, she posted her profile on the job platform and quickly got a call from vpTech. She decided to jump onboard. After working on a couple of projects, she finally settled down in the forecasting team. Now a team of 8 across 3 countries.

Betty loves how tangible her job is: “One would think that programming is very abstract when most of the time it is the complete opposite. At vpTech, we are lucky to have such a massive user base that each incremental change can be measured. It allows us to actually see if our work helps or not”.

Outside of her work, Betty likes to participate in the Paris Women in Machine Learning & Data Science meetup (WiMLDS Paris) where she is now in charge of a reading (technical) paper session every third Thursday of the month.

4. Carine Buttez , Developer @ Finance Tribe

Carine came to tech as an intense teenage gamer: “Growing up with my brother and my cousin in a video game world, at some point I needed to dig more and check how things were done under the hood”. However, 3 years into her professional career, Carine went for a drastic move: “I became a professional… dog educator.”

“Not only was it a sector where I didn’t know anyone but it was a massive personal move as I had to freelance. On top of this, I am rather introverte. For the first time I had to sell myself and conduct long interviews with dog owners. People I had never met before. This time of my life helped me a lot overcoming my shyness and I still benefit from it every day.”

Unfortunately, making a living out of it was too hard. Hence, Carine decided to get back to coding, except this time she wanted to focus on a stricter language than PHP. She decided to learn C# by herself while working in various shops. Fortunately, her efforts paid off as she landed a job for a small insurance company. “Convincing an employer to trust me on a language on which I had absolutely no professional experience was yet again a massive personal achievement”.

Today, within the Veepee Finance Tribe, Carine job is actively involved on the SAM project (Stock Accounting Machine), whose goal is to calculate stock valuation and depreciation and send it to our new ERP. “I really enjoy coding, build algorithm, solve problems… when I focus on a development, I do not see time passing. Moreover, Stock business is really rich and exciting… even if sometimes it just turns your brain upside down!”

5. Cristina Orgiu, Support team manager @ Digital Factory

Cristina grew up in Paris suburbs, from a French mother and an Italian father. After studying in the French capital, she wanted to move away so she applied to jobs in the South of France. “To this day, one of my greatest achievements was to settle all by myself in Avignon, right after my studies. I didn’t have a job or an apartment and I didn’t know anyone. I am proud because I achieved it all by myself and it gave me the confidence I needed at this crucial time.”

After 4 years of working intense hours, evenings and weekends, she felt that while physical retail had been an amazing sector to take her up the learning curve, she had to move away from it.

She didn’t know anything about tech but she had learned to manage a team and based on this one skill she landed her first job at Veepee in February 2016. She first managed the shooting team and led the automation photoshooting software. As she was keen in giving many feedback, in January 2018, she eventually got an offer to lead the support team for the entire sales production department.

Her team of 5 - all men - now supports 600 internal users across 10 different products and 5 different countries, totaling an average of 600 tickets per month. Cristina is literally passionate about management and how it makes a team more efficient as well as more enjoyable… especially within the tech industry.

6. Elisa Regnier, Full stack developer @ Data Integration

Elisa started a career as a sound technician but at 25, she decided to go for a radical career switch. She completed LeWagon Coding bootcamp. “This still is the most radical and stressful decision I have taken. Luckily by the end of the first week at LeWagon, I knew I made the right choice”

After a couple months of freelancing, she joined Scalia when it was still a startup which then went on to be acquired by Veepee. She remained as a full stack developer for the Scalia product within vpTech. If it was still needed, Elisa is the living example that with determination and perseverance a full reconversion as a developer is completely achievable.

Elisa still has the same great feeling of achievement when one of her features is pushed to production. “I’ve been doing this job for almost 2 years, I still get goosebumps when I see my work being useful to end users.”

As part of our discussion, Elisa mentioned another interesting aspect where logic oriented work such as coding makes you progress in her daily life. “Code requires a lot of structure. Such a way of thinking impacts my personal life. It forces me to make more rational decisions.”

Outside of work, Elisa has founded two clubs about electronic music.

7. Isabelle Riche, Lead developer @ Member Life Cycle

Isabelle was born and raised in Normandy. Coming out of engineering school, she wanted to work on high frequency projects - “in an area prior to wifi” - but due to the “Year 2000 problem” employers were loading up in computer engineering. That is how she landed her first job back in 1998. Through serendipity, in 2007 she started on working on Neolane. Back then it was a small software package but she hasn’t gotten off the hook since. At vpTech, she is now the ‘Member Life Cycle’ lead developer, managing a team of 4.

Throughout our discussion, Isabelle kept mentioning the importance of team work. Even if programming is an expertise work, for Isabelle, it is inconceivable to do it on her own. Despite having a huge diversity among her team in every aspect - age, location, programming language or even contract type - she takes great pride into getting everyone highly committed. She loves the support they show when one of them gets stuck. She loves that they get each other’ back when they are on monitoring duty over the weekend.

Truth being told, Isabelle isn’t so much of a diplomat. She has a reputation for being direct and frank and I guess - even in a large organization such as vpTech - people value this part of her personality.

8. Manon Dansin, Proxi Product owner @ FlashSales

Manon grew up in Val de Marne, in the Parisian suburbs. When she was a kid, she wanted to work in the book industry. However, during the course of her studies she realized she had to shift towards online and registered for a bachelor in web project management and then for a Master in IT system management.

While studying, Manon was working part time for large banks fulfilling various positions. “Even though the organizations weren’t appealing, it gave me the opportunity to observe or even to test a very wide range of tasks.” That’s when she discovered the whole testing world and got excited about it. “It had the right level of technicality and challenge I was looking for. It was also a good fit with my overall personality, I am someone that is very organisation driven”.

After only 14 months, her vpTech experience took an unexpected turn in January 2019 when she had to move to Orléans for personal reasons. As both parties wanted to keep working together, they agreed on a list of rules to apply. Since then Manon has been working remotely.

Recently, she even had the opportunity to move from her QA position and become a proxi-Product Owner putting herself at risk in a brand new position. “I am not really someone who will create my own opportunities but when one comes to me, I don’t hesitate long before taking it. Ultimately, it is just a matter of believing in yourself and being able to adapt.”

9. Marie Crappe, Head of Data Science

While at business school, Marie got involved in basic tech jobs -WordPress set up, performance and UX auditing - “to pay the bills”. That is when she realized that she actually liked it and decided to switch to an engineering school. She started off her career as a data scientist then went on to become the CTO of a startup operating between France and Russia. She is currently the head of the Data Science department at vpTech.

She runs multiple artificial intelligence projects such as the home page personalization, dynamic intelligent re-merchandising and automatic product images labelling. She loves the challenges diversity she has to tackle “from communication and pedagogy, to A/B test results analysis, data architecture all the way to site reliability engineering”.

As she is climbing up the management ladder fast, Marie is afraid of losing touch with the technical aspects. “Obviously, technology evolves constantly and requires constant monitoring to remain on top of the game. But truth be told, I also want to keep on doing stuff by myself because I just love it”.

Marie is a great illustration of aiming high while staying in touch with reality.

10. Moufida Dubreuil, Lead Product Owner @ Digital Factory

Moufida has been working for Veepee for 12 years. Hence, the ridiculous amount of stories she told me… to my greatest pleasure. She started on the business side as a ‘Sale coordinator’, got promoted to 5 other positions and she now runs a team of over 35 people… without any technical background.

Being literally a part of such a success story for so long, Moufida has a great feeling of accomplishment. “It is not simply the sensation of ‘We did it !’ but more like ‘WAOUAWOUW WE DID ALL OF THIS?!!’”

“I have spent the 10 first years of my Veepee life trying to find ways to bypass our tech constraints to develop new business lines… Now that I am on the tech side, I spend my time on re-building the tools to make them more agile, and scalable to support creative business people, like I was back then. Hence, knowing both sides well is my strong suit.”

Finally, Moufida insists that she has accomplished all of this while remaining true to her personal values and being the proud mom of a 3.5 year old boy with a great personality of his own.

👩‍💻 If you want to read and hear about more amazing French women in tech, please visit Duchess France.

📸 Credits to Alex Faure for all the pictures