I'm Emilien Kenler, a systems architect and software engineer specialising in distributed systems, infrastructure automation, and autonomous AI. I'm currently working at pafin as Director of Systems Architecture.

My technical journey started early. While still a student in France, I founded a company selling Minecraft servers in 2011, building a lightweight infrastructure-as-a-service platform using Node.js and RabbitMQ. That hands-on experience with distributed systems, resource orchestration, and automation set the direction for everything that followed.

Since then I've built systems across several industries — real-time multiplayer gaming at Wizcorp, restaurant reservation infrastructure at TableCheck, and financial technology platforms at pafin — giving me a broad view of the architectural challenges that show up at scale regardless of domain.

Throughout my career, I have focused on infrastructure, data pipelines, and databases, with a particular affinity for Terraform and Kubernetes. I work across Python, TypeScript, Scala, and Go, and have built microservices and event-driven data pipelines using Akka, Kafka, gRPC, and Twirp. In recent years I have focused on products that help people track their cryptocurrency portfolios, compute their gains, and comply with local tax regulations.

More recently, I have developed a deep interest in AI and autonomous systems. The core challenges of agentic engineering — orchestrating distributed components, managing state across asynchronous operations, handling failures gracefully, and optimising for cost — are the same ones I have been working on for over a decade. This led me to write Agentic Engineering, a practical guide to building production-grade autonomous AI systems with Python, published in 2026.

I am the author of the following books:

• Agentic Engineering: Building Autonomous AI Systems with Python (2026)
• MariaDB Essentials, Packt Publishing (2015)

See my resume »