I’m Alexis Rondeau. I lead research and I build software, and lately I do both at once: I run autonomous research loops, where AI agents design, run and judge hundreds of experiments under rules I set, and every result goes on the record, including the ones that didn’t work.
I’ve been building things for twenty-eight years: as a founder (One Month through Y Combinator, PercentMobile, Semapedia), as a coach of engineering teams at Pivotal Labs, as a researcher with Freakonomics and the University of Vienna, and for the last five years as a principal engineer in private wealth management, where confidentiality and reliability come first.
What I do now
I’m Principal Product Engineer at FELS Family Office GmbH.
On the side I run autonomous research loops: I give an AI agent a hard question, a way to measure the answer and a budget, and let it run experiments until it finds something I couldn’t have written by hand. Recent ones:
- Can a UAV learn a city by heart? A 3.1 MB neural memory that places a UAV over Berlin to within 27 m, with no GPS and no map on board.
- Evolving a quadcopter frame with a genetic algorithm and Claude as an occasional co-designer, for a frame that flies 16% more efficiently.
- Teaching a phone-sized language model to ask questions nearly as well as a frontier model, in 96 experiments.
- Letting an agent discover scheduling rules instead of writing them myself.
- Can an autonomous research loop find the secret of Kryptos K4? Not solved yet: 198 ways tried, each one on the record.
Where I’ve been
Twenty-eight years of building things, newest first.
- FELS Family Office, Berlin (since 2025). Principal engineer.
- RIDE Capital, Berlin (2023–2025). Principal Software Engineer, and the company’s internal AI champion: I ran its AI Days, where mixed teams built 17 custom GPTs in two days.
- Self-employed, Berlin (2021–2023). Senior Software Engineer for hire.
- C Space (2018–2021). Senior Market Research Consultant, freelance and remote from Berlin.
- Pivotal Labs, New York City (2015–2017). Senior Software Engineer and Engineering Manager. I coached eleven client teams to ship better products faster with lean experiments, pair programming and test-driven development.
- Amino Systems, New York City (2012–2015). My own consultancy. Its biggest job: the data architecture and web application behind Prof. Steve Levitt’s Freakonomics Experiments, a randomized field experiment with 20,000 people on how a coin toss shapes big life decisions.
- Venture Metrix, New York City (2014–2015). Co-founder and CTO of a private data-sharing network for VCs and their portfolio founders, tracking $2.9B in investment assets.
- One Month, New York City (2013). Founding member and technical co-founder. I designed and wrote a best-selling programming course for complete beginners; it took us through Y Combinator, we raised $2.5M, and One Month has been profitable since 2016.
- General Assembly, New York City (2013). Instructor of a crash course on prototyping your web application idea with Ruby on Rails.
- Delivr, New York City (2010–2014). Senior Consultant on advertising and marketing infrastructure projects.
- Rhein-Main-Verkehrsverbund, Frankfurt (2006–2012). IT Consultant to the regional transit authority: mobile web strategy, a system-wide NFC content-delivery and tracking infrastructure, and mobile customer feedback.
- PercentMobile, New York City (2007–2012). Co-founder. I designed and built a mobile big-data analytics system used by Coca-Cola, The Gap, Virgin Airlines, Dictionary.com, Burger King and many more.
- R/GA, New York City (2006–2009). Software Engineer. A lead-generation system for Nokia, integrated with their Siebel CRM, in heavy Java; my local test suite ended up helping debug their mainframes in Finland and India. On the side I organised community events for mobile developers in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, the MobileCamps.
- Semapedia, New York City (2005–2007). Co-founder of the first social QR code project in the western world, built on Ruby on Rails when QR codes, RFID and NFC were brand new. Featured in Wired, a Vogue September issue, The Wall Street Journal, Der Spiegel and Der Standard; I spoke about it in Beijing, Shanghai, Berlin, Boston and Cambridge.
- University of Vienna (2004–2006). Research Associate on grid-computing infrastructure in Java and XML, teaching undergraduates software engineering in C, C++ and Java.
- uniforce Consulting, Vienna (2003–2005). IT Consultant.
- DreamersWin, New York (1999–2002). Co-founder. We built a pilot site to help people with projects and causes raise capital and awareness, years before Kickstarter, in PHP and MySQL on Debian.
- DDB, New York City (1999). Creative Technology Intern, researching emerging design and technology trends and building client pages in HTML, the then-new CSS, and JavaScript.
- Studio Tsiaras, New York City (1999). Executive assistant to the artist Philip Tsiaras, managing the studio and its production.
- CDC Consulting, Frankfurt (1998–1999). Intern, building client pages in HTML and JavaScript.
- Tinaia 9, Florence (1997). Intern, assisting artists in the studio.
This site
Everything I publish ends up here, in the order I published it: posts from Twitter, videos from YouTube and notes from my vault, going back more than a decade. Start with the newsfeed or browse the archive.
Say hello
I’d love to hear what you think. I’m @SpringStreetNYC on Twitter, akaalias on GitHub, on LinkedIn and on YouTube.