I’m Yann Labour — a CTO and full-stack engineer with 18+ years building and running software, currently leading technology at CapStellar, a digital-assets company based between Europe and Mauritius.
My job there is the whole stack of the CTO role: setting the architecture, shipping the product, keeping the lights on, and making sure the platform is secure and can be trusted with people’s money. I do that with a small team and a strong bias for automation over headcount.
What I’m working on
Platform architecture & a full V2→V3 rebuild. I own the architecture of record — the ADRs, the migration runbooks, the service boundaries. We’re moving a Node.js/Python monolith to a modern Laravel 12 + API Platform microservices stack: a core API plus dedicated services for portfolio execution, job dispatch/routing, index constituents, and gamification, fronted by a family of React SPAs, a mobile app, and a browser extension that walks users through exchange setup.
AI where it earns its place. I built “Hector,” our AI customer-support agent (Claude + a retrieval knowledge base + tool access), and a fleet of ~75 automation workflows that quietly run onboarding, lifecycle, billing, reporting, and content — the work that would otherwise need several more hires. I also stood up an AI-driven SEO content pipeline for an acquired media property, generating and publishing original financial articles daily.
Security & resilience. I led the technical response to an external penetration test and a CIS/ANSSI configuration audit end-to-end — authentication and authorization hardening, TLS and secrets management, encryption of sensitive data, and a security regression suite so the fixes stay fixed. I care a lot about the boring parts: encryption at rest, immutable audit trails, incident handling, and operational resilience.
Data & decisions. I run our analytics backbone — ingestion pipelines feeding a data lake and BI dashboards — so the business steers on real numbers instead of guesses.
How I work
I like the builder’s version of the CTO job: close enough to the code to be dangerous, far enough back to see the whole board. I optimize for business outcomes, not novelty — the best system is usually the one a small team can actually operate at 2am. I automate relentlessly, write things down, and treat security and reliability as features, not afterthoughts.
Stack
Backend: PHP (Laravel), Python (FastAPI), Node.js · Frontend: React, Vue.js, TypeScript, TailwindCSS · Data: MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, BigQuery · Cloud/DevOps: AWS, Azure, Cloudflare, Docker, CI/CD, Nginx/HAProxy · AI/Automation: Claude, MCP, n8n, retrieval/RAG.
Beyond the terminal
Off the clock you’ll find me cooking (Mediterranean and Asian, mostly), buried in science fiction (Asimov, Philip K. Dick, Brandon Sanderson), or tinkering with home automation. I’m also an active member of the Laravel Mauritius community and occasionally give technical talks. I’m based in Mauritius.
Latest from the kitchen:
Want to talk architecture, AI automation, or digital assets? Reach me by email, or find me on LinkedIn and GitHub.