René Cotton
Tech & AI Leader · CTO / VP Engineering / CIO
Allex, France · Valence/Lyon area preferred · open to the rest of France
linkedin.com/in/cottonrene
Profile
Builder of an e-commerce SaaS run for 18 years: 400,000+ stores managed, hundreds of millions of euros in orders processed every month. A structuring profile: I turn a creative vision into a reliable, secure and scalable product. Member of the executive committee, comfortable with the financial, people and marketing constraints of a business. Early adopter of generative AI in production, from 2022, before ChatGPT was released. Maia now handles 60% of support conversations with 96% customer satisfaction. Long-standing full-remote manager, used to working inside a leadership team.
Experience
Co-founder, CEO & CTO · WiziShop Group2008 — now
French SaaS for building e-commerce stores, powered by AI.
- Built the whole platform, from the first server to a 90+ machine infrastructure.
- Technical lead (2 employees) → technology lead of 25+ engineers (Front/Back/Infra/QA), mostly remote · 80+ hires made.
- Current scope: infrastructure, AI, architecture, strategy, innovation, with delivery delegated to the Head of Engineering.
- Co-running the company on the executive committee: financial, people and marketing trade-offs.
- Integrated a large number of vendors: payment, shipping, marketplaces, hosting, managed services.
- Methods: Scrum then Kanban, self-hosted GitLab CI/CD, a strong code review culture.
Multi-brand architecture: Dropizi (dropshipping, 2018) and Evolup (AI-powered affiliate stores, 2023) built natively on the same stack, so every improvement benefits every product in the group.
Co-founder & Managing Partner · Absolut Créations2005 — 2015
Web agency (Nice) — development and integration for large accounts.
- Feasibility analysis, commercial proposals, team management (3 engineers), co-running the company.
- Created the Absolut-Photo.com portal (camera reviews, spec sheets, a very active forum), run until its acquisition by Idealo.
Teaching & media · SupDeWeb, 2089, CampusID · Goood Morning Web2012 — 2022
- E-commerce lecturer (2012-2018): course design, hands-on workshops, assessment. Daily podcast on web news (2018-2022).
Detailed achievements, speaking engagements and community work: cv.rene-cotton.fr
rené cotton : resume
cv.rene-cotton.fr
More about my career
The detail behind the one-page summary: achievements, speaking engagements and community involvement.
Selected achievements
Company-wide AI integrationfrom 2022
My initiative, my full ownership, before ChatGPT was released.
- Product: AI features for customers (product descriptions, SEO and more).
- Engineering teams: AI in daily work — code generation, MCP integrations, a company “second brain”, Claude Code rolled out to the whole team.
- Non-technical teams: training, custom tools and OpenClaw set up on demand.
Maia: conversational AI for customer supportcreated
- Draws on the entire documentation set (public, internal, blog) and adapts to the customer profile.
- Self-service inside the product, plus support agents augmented with pre-drafted answers.
- 60% of support conversations handled by Maia · 96% customer satisfaction. Support team reshaped around a proactive role.
Running a multi-tenant SaaS infrastructure90+ servers
- Redis at scale, a sharded MariaDB master/slave fleet, sharded Meilisearch, Nginx/HaProxy, Apache/PHP, a RabbitMQ cluster for async work, run together with a managed services team.
- Automatic absorption of seasonal peaks. Load proven in practice (a customer featured on the TV show Capital in 2017, major influencer campaigns).
- Automated fleet management, anti-DDoS resilience (fail2ban/ipset, rate limiting, Edge Firewall).
Digital sovereignty & cost control (self-hosting)
- Migrations: Algolia → Meilisearch (circular replication), Datadog → SigNoz, self-hosted GitLab and Sentry.
- Lower costs and broader tooling capabilities, without depending on third parties.
Reliability & a post-mortem culture
- Resolved performance crises (ClickHouse: 3.2M partitions consolidated down to about 500).
- A major migration reverted in < 24 h, with a post-mortem and a fast change of direction : documented failure is part of the method.
Experience — additional detail
Co-founder, CEO & CTO (continued) · WiziShop Group2008 — now
French SaaS for building e-commerce stores, powered by AI.
- Designed WiziBlock, the page customisation tool used across the stores.
- Structured remote management: weekly 1:1s with managers, internal reporting, monthly all-hands.
- European Commission e-commerce development committee: bringing the SaaS e-commerce perspective.