Pascal Rodriguez

I build trusted AI for industries that cannot afford a wrong answer, and the engineering teams that keep it running.

CTO & Partner, Visium SA, Lausanne. Dad, triathlete, Ironman finisher.

Now

For the past 15 years, I’ve built and led engineering teams that ship resilient, high-quality software at scale. Today at Visium, I’m focused on a harder version of that problem: building AI systems that regulated industries can actually trust.

Most AI systems don’t make it past pilot in Life Sciences and other regulated settings, and for good reason. Probabilistic systems are difficult to validate, audit, and certify. My job, as CTO and Partner at Visium, is to close that gap: defining the technical strategy, leading the engineering org, and turning Agentic AI research into products that hold up under real compliance and operational constraints. Before Visium, I led engineering at Bestmile through to its acquisition by ZF Group.

What I care about: engineering cultures where people do their best work. Distributed systems that don’t fall over at 3am. AI solutions that create real business value, not demos. I’ve also been mentoring the next generation of engineering leaders through PlatoHQ, The Mentoring Club, and MentorCruise since 2020.

If you’re working on scaling an AI product into a regulated environment, restructuring an engineering org, or thinking through technical strategy for an AI-first company, I’m always happy to talk.

Before

Twenty-two years of building software and the teams around it, most recent first.

2022

Visium SA Lausanne, Switzerland

CTO & Partner, 04.2026 → todayEngineering Director & Partner, 06.2022 → 04.2026

Leading Visium's transformation into a product-driven AI organization, directing engineering teams building production-grade LLM-native systems, agentic workflows and NLU-powered conversational agents. Responsible for technical vision, reliability standards, and delivering scalable GenAI solutions to enterprise clients.

What I did there
  • Driving the shift toward a product-oriented model, identifying and standardizing reusable assets, and implementing a scalable technology and product roadmap.
  • Championing the adoption of Generative AI and next-generation AI capabilities, ensuring Visium stays ahead in the evolving AI landscape.
  • Establishing best-in-class engineering practices through MLOps frameworks, CI/CD automation, cloud-native architectures, and modern software development standards.
  • Scaling engineering operations by structuring teams, optimizing delivery processes, and mentoring future leaders to sustain a high-performance culture.
  • Architected bidirectional streaming pipelines and real-time agentic orchestration systems, ensuring low-latency, high-reliability performance in production environments.

Agentic and Generative AI, NLU, LLMs, RAG, Agno, Python, FastAPI, TypeScript, React, MLOps, Kubernetes, Terraform, Pulumi, AWS, GCP, Azure

2021

ZF Group Bern, Switzerland

Director of Product Engineering, 08.2021 → 06.2022

Transitioning the Bestmile engineering teams and technology into a new home. Following the acquisition of the Bestmile IP and hiring of Bestmile's engineering teams, ensuring a smooth and happy transition for individuals and efficient integration of the products into the ZF digital portfolio.

Bestmile's technology was acquired by ZF Group

Scala, Akka, Kafka, Kubernetes, Docker, Postgres, MongoDB, AWS, gRPC, DDD, Event-storming, Serverless, Python, NodeJS, Go, Terraform, Helm, Bash, Spark, Sagemaker

2017

Bestmile Lausanne, Switzerland

Director of Engineering, 03.2017 → 10.2021

Designing and leading the development of the world's first cloud platform for the operation and optimization of autonomous vehicle fleets, allowing the management of mixed fleets composed of vehicles of different types and brands, and hybrid fleets of both autonomous and human-driven vehicles.

What I did there
  • Oversaw all aspects of engineering operations and the architecture and design of the platform from a software engineering and cloud infrastructure point of view.
  • Shaped the agile mindset of the company in both quality and delivery by defining and adapting the process from feature inception to deployment across teams and technologies.
  • Contributed to the product strategy and roadmap, following market and investors' requirements.
  • Coordinated the development of new features from inception to maintenance, working closely with internal and external stakeholders such as customers, product managers and the delivery teams.
  • Introduced the "you build it; you run it" philosophy, enabling teams to own the delivery of their code up to production through continuous delivery pipelines.
  • Defined engineering KPIs to measure team engagement, velocity, and quality of deliveries.
  • Initiated the migration to Infrastructure-as-Code of the entire cloud infrastructure.
  • Managed multiple integration projects with external partners.
  • Introduced Domain-Driven Design and event-storming techniques to identify and scope micro-services responsibilities with their respective domain events used for communication.
  • Organically grew the team from 1 to 12 engineers.
  • Followed the development of team members through one-to-ones and OKRs.
  • Encouraged a continuous learning and knowledge-sharing culture among the teams.
  • Actively participated in 3 funding rounds and due diligence processes.

Scala, Akka, Kafka, Kubernetes, Docker, Postgres, MongoDB, AWS, Azure, GCP, gRPC, DDD, Event-storming, Serverless, Python, NodeJS, Go, Terraform, Helm, Bash, Spark, Sagemaker, Vehicle SDKs, OEM APIs

2014

Easel TV London, United Kingdom

Head of Technology / Lead Software Engineer, 06.2014 → 03.2017

Designing and leading the development of the new generation of reactive SaaS multi-screen video platform based on Scala, Play and Akka, running on AWS and Azure.

What I did there
  • Transformed the initial incomplete EventSource based platform prototype into a fully functional, maintainable and scalable product using Play, Akka-persistence, Akka and Slick.
  • Introduced the initial management dashboard based on Play and evolved it to an AngularJS single page app.
  • Designed and developed the playlist management system and platform recommendation engine based on Neo4J and ElasticSearch as well as simple rule based filtering algorithms.
  • Designed and implemented the automated video ingestion workflows allowing to securely (DRM) encode, encrypt and publish premium content videos by integrating different Azure services.
  • Defined and implemented internal and external REST APIs of the platform.
  • Designed a component to dynamically serve on-demand re-sized images in a non-blocking way, integrated with AWS CloudFront and S3.
  • Migrated and transformed legacy Java services to Scala based web services.
  • Actively promoted the use of reactive and functional programming patterns within the team.
  • Introduced an SRE/DevOps mindset through infrastructure as code to provision and deploy the cloud infrastructure.
  • Organically grew the team from 2 to 10 engineers.
  • Mentored team members by means of pairing and code reviews.
  • Encouraged a continuous learning and knowledge sharing culture among the team by means of regular presentations and tech lunches.
  • Directed the implementation of testing strategies for the product code base, including unit, integration and acceptance testing.
  • Introduced code reviews into the development workflow to enhance code quality and improve knowledge sharing.
  • Implemented and organized Agile processes as well as leading the different ceremonies such as sprint planning, retrospective and daily stand-up.

Scala, Play, Akka, Akka-Persistence, Slick, Sbt, ScalaTest, Spec2, Guice, JavaScript, AngularJS, NodeJS, Neo4j, ElasticSearch, MongoDB, Postgres, AWS, Azure

2008

SICPA Security Solutions SA Lausanne, Switzerland

Software Engineer, 11.2008 → 06.2014

Building distributed Secure Track and Trace Systems for governments.

What I did there
  • Developed a scalable RESTful API to securely authenticate and serve smartphone applications requests (Android and iOS) using Redis, JAX-RS, JBoss, JMS, JPA, MySQL, Oracle.
  • Involved in all development phases of a real-time product aggregation system from solution requirements definition, software specifications, design, implementation, testing and on-site deployment. Led two developers based in Brazil for the backend implementation.
  • Initiated and responsible for the adoption and migration to Git. Defined the workflows to be used during the development.

JEE6, Maven, Subversion, Spring, Hibernate, Guice, JBehave, Swing, Ruby, Rails, Grails, MongoDB, MySQL, MSSQL, JBoss, Tomcat, Jetty, Redis, JavaScript, Git, TDD, BDD, Puppet

2004

Bobst SA Lausanne, Switzerland

Systems Engineer, 2006 → 2008Database & System Administrator, 2004 → 2006

What I did there
  • Introduced the Linux operating system within the IT department.
  • Infrastructure automation using DevOps techniques on top of the UC4 multi-platform enterprise job planning system.
  • Led the worldwide implementation of VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3.
  • Completed a project for the migration of critical databases from Oracle 8i and 9i to Oracle 10g.
  • IT administration of Unix, Windows and VMware ESX servers (more than 200).
  • Implementation of a multi-platform and Open Source monitoring solution.

Linux, Unix, Virtualization, Oracle DB, Project management, Bash, VBScript

Writing

RSS

Readme

We trust each other. You're very good at your job. I'm not very good at your job. We win together, we fail together.

A user manual for working with me. Read it.