Michael Boutin
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Summary

Product engineer and technical lead with 9+ years across AI, fintech, and SaaS, working as a forward-deployed engineer: embedding with a client's leadership and teams, learning how the business actually runs, and turning their problems into AI-powered tools in production. Started on the business side, as a BI consultant working with CGI's executive team and a business analyst at Flinks. Most recently led the design and team-wide adoption of an AI-driven publishing workflow at ComfyUI, the $500M-valuation open-source generative AI platform, and owned the entire web application of an AI pricing platform serving 150+ hotel properties. Reviews code daily, leads and mentors developers, and pairs an AI-augmented workflow with rigorous engineering discipline in Next.js, React, TypeScript, and Node.js. Bilingual, English and French.

Work Experience

  1. Senior Front-End Developer

    2026

    ComfyUIContract via Toptal

    • Forward-deployed with the marketing team: learned how they publish, then built a Slack-to-Claude agent pipeline around their workflow so non-engineers ship production pages.
    • Proposed, designed, and drove to full adoption a Claude Code chat workflow for Comfy Org, the $500M-valuation San Francisco startup behind ComfyUI: anyone on the team creates a production page through chat alone, no code and no UI, gated by Vercel preview URLs and an approval step before merge. It is now the standard publishing tool of the entire marketing team.
    • Owned the architecture decision behind it, making PayloadCMS the structural backbone: chat-created pages assemble existing, structured content blocks instead of generating one-off code, so the site stays consistent as non-engineers ship pages without engineering.
    • Led one developer and acted as reviewer of record: daily code review of engineering and marketing-authored changes, triage and resolution of CodeRabbit findings, and the conventions that kept AI-assisted contributions safe to merge.
    • Built and maintained features in ComfyUI's complex, high-performance web application, a platform with 4M+ users, 150K+ daily downloads, and an ecosystem of 60K+ community-built nodes.

    Tech: Vue 3, Astro, PayloadCMS, TypeScript, CodeRabbit, Tailwind CSS, CustomerIO, Supabase, PostgreSQL, GCP

  2. Senior Full-Stack Developer & Architect

    2026

    Afi ExpertiseClient of Concreo

    • Brought in to rebuild afiexpertise.com end to end for a bilingual (FR/EN) corporate training company: owned the architecture review, the choice of services, and the delivery of the new Next.js, Sanity, and Tailwind CSS platform from first commit to launch.
    • Worked forward-deployed with the client: learned how AFI runs its training and enrollment operations, then shaped the platform and its integrations around that workflow.
    • Integrated the Administrate training management system to power a 360+ course catalog with faceted filtering by faculty, subject, and certification, mapping its API onto the client's enrollment workflow and engineering around the platform's limitations.
    • Built in-app course checkout with Stripe, turning the site from a brochure into a transactional platform.
    • Modernized the CMS by migrating content into Sanity, enabling the content team to self-serve in both languages.
    • Preserved and improved SEO through the migration while leaving a markedly more maintainable codebase.
    • Delivered the rebuild with my own AI development workflow built on Claude Code, combining custom and existing agent skills to ship faster.

    Tech: Next.js, React, TypeScript, Sanity, Tailwind CSS, Stripe, Administrate, HubSpot

  3. Lead Full-Stack Developer & Product Manager

    2024 – 2026

    TakeUpContract via Toptal

    • Owned the entire web application of an AI pricing platform managing live room rates for 150+ hotels, boutique hotels, and B&Bs: architecture, roadmap, specs, and delivery, as the sole web developer across an 18-month engagement.
    • Rebuilt the product from the ground up, migrating 70 live properties and their paying users from Bubble.io to Next.js: kept the core AI and property data intact, migrated only property metadata, and cut over with no data-migration downtime beyond a brief DNS switch.
    • Worked as the client's forward-deployed engineer: embedded daily with the founders and the data science team on product direction, writing the specs and defining the roadmap that turned AI rate recommendations into workflows operators trust to preview, edit, and approve, built in Next.js, React, shadcn/ui, and Server Actions.
    • Connected the front end to Python and FastAPI services running pricing logic and AI inference, owning the latency and error-handling story across the boundary.
    • Established the engineering baseline: PostHog product analytics, Sentry error monitoring, an automated test suite, CI that gates every deploy on passing tests, and organization-based authentication with Clerk for multi-property access.

    Tech: React, Next.js, TypeScript, Highcharts, Clerk, PostHog, Sentry, Node.js, CSS

  4. Founder & Senior Product Manager

    2020 – Present

    Concreo Solutions Inc.

    • Founded and run a product engineering consultancy, delivering six client engagements (marked "Client of Concreo" below) end to end across ed-tech, HR-tech, food delivery, and creative industries, from scoping and architecture through production launch and post-launch support.
    • Work in a forward-deployed model: embed with each client's leadership, map the business problem, and own delivery from prototype to production.
    • Deliberately hands-on: every engagement is scoped, architected, built, and shipped personally so the quality is guaranteed by the person accountable for it. Every project reached production with a maintainable handoff, two clients converted to ongoing retainers, and new work comes through Toptal and referrals.

    Tech: React, Vue, Nuxt.js, Next.js, Svelte, Firebase, Tailwind CSS, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Laravel, AWS Amplify, GCP, Vercel

  5. Senior Full-Stack Developer

    2024 – Present

    HumanlyClient of Concreo

    • Own the marketing website of Humanly, an AI hiring platform, end to end, including its roadmap; engaged directly after Humanly acquired Teamable, a previous client.
    • Embedded engineering partner to the marketing team: built the multi-page site in Next.js, Sanity, Tailwind CSS, and shadcn/ui, with a reusable component layer that shortened time-to-feature and a content model non-technical teammates ship with, no engineering required.
    • Delivered polished, animated, WCAG-accessible experiences across desktop, tablet, and mobile.

    Tech: Next.js, React, Sanity Studio, Tailwind CSS, Shadcn, Resend

  6. Full-Stack & 3D Developer

    2022 – 2024

    WeareskyClient of Concreo

    • Designed and built a 3D-centric web experience with Nuxt.js, Three.js, and GSAP that became the brand's primary visual differentiator.
    • Optimized heavy 3D assets to render smoothly across devices, improving mobile engagement, and built a reusable Vue component library for 3D-driven layouts.

    Tech: Vue 3, Nuxt.js, Three.js, GSAP, Tailwind CSS, Contentful, Google Analytics 4

  7. Front-End Developer

    2022 – 2024

    TeamableClient of Concreo

    • Designed and shipped Teamable.com's UI in Next.js and Tailwind CSS for the venture-backed, San Francisco-based hiring platform, with WCAG-compliant accessibility and responsive performance.
    • Teamable was acquired by Humanly in 2024, which then engaged me directly for its own site.

    Tech: Next.js, React, Tailwind CSS, Google Analytics 4

  8. Front-End Developer

    2021 – 2022

    GricsClient of Concreo

    • Built the reusable component suite for an internal admin dashboard, adopted by a team of roughly 10 developers as its component reference.
    • Hardened quality with Jest test suites and Storybook documentation used by developers and stakeholders alike.

    Tech: Vue 3, Nuxt.js, Vuetify, Jest, Storybook, Azure DevOps

  9. Full-Stack Developer

    2020 – 2021

    TakeInClient of Concreo

    • Built the back end handling concurrent food orders at scale, including secure Stripe payment integration.
    • Refactored core user and order code paths, measurably improving performance and maintainability.

    Tech: Nuxt.js, Vue, Firebase, Stripe, Node.js, TypeScript, Docker

  10. Product Owner & Front-End Developer

    2020 – 2021

    Zumrails

    • Joined Zumrails as its fourth team member at founding stage and helped define the initial product: the first mockups and the marketing proposal that shaped its fintech payments platform. The team had grown to 10 by the time I left.
    • Zumrails went on to raise a Series A at a $100M+ valuation (2024).

    Tech: Vue 3, Nuxt.js, Tailwind CSS, Figma, i18n

  11. Business Analyst & Product Owner

    2019

    Flinks

    • Started as a business analyst, mapping, cleaning up, and automating internal processes, which built the end-to-end understanding of the platform I later relied on as Product Owner.
    • Owned the Wealth Data product, expanding Flinks' data coverage from banking to investment and wealth accounts, and launched the product-led growth initiative: an invitation-only platform letting customers self-onboard without talking to a sales rep.
    • Drove product vision, roadmap, release planning, and user story elaboration across both initiatives.
    • Flinks was acquired by National Bank of Canada for $100M (2021).

    Tech: Aha!, Figma, Research, Bootstrap

  12. Business Intelligence Consultant

    2017 – 2019

    CGI

    • Worked directly with CGI's executive team to build their business intelligence reporting and forecasting in Tableau and Power BI, which became the source of truth for executive KPI monitoring.
    • Embedded in the business intelligence unit of a major Canadian bank, delivering reporting for the entire bank, which meant learning how complex banking processes work end to end before reporting on them.
    • Designed scenario and sensitivity models to predict financial outcomes and pressure-test strategic initiatives.

    Tech: Tableau, Power BI, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, SQL