About
I’m Nicolas Borson, an Engineering Manager based in Lyon, France.
I lead the Profile squad at Batch, a B2B mobile marketing infrastructure company used by brands to reach and engage their users across app, web, email and SMS. My team owns the profiles platform, one of the most critical and heavily loaded parts of the product: it stores and maintains billions of user profiles and keeps them up to date as data flows in continuously from our customers’ apps, websites and backends.
The challenges we work on are those of high-scale, real-time systems. Every event and attribute update has to be ingested, processed and reflected in a profile within seconds, so that marketers can segment, target and trigger messages based on what their users are doing right now. That means handling a constant, high-throughput stream of writes while serving low-latency reads, all with strong guarantees on data consistency and availability. Our stack is built around Kafka for streaming, TiDB as our distributed transactional store, and ClickHouse for analytics, along with the APIs and services that tie them together. Recent work has included migrating core profile storage to TiDB and defining SLOs on indexation lag, so that “real-time” remains a promise we can measure and hold ourselves to.
Before becoming an Engineering Manager, I was a Technical Project Manager at Batch. I organized and tracked delivery across the engineering team, and led the change management effort to bring agile practices into how we worked day to day. That experience still shapes how I lead: I care about predictable delivery, clear priorities, and lightweight processes that help teams move faster.
Alongside that, I have a strong infrastructure and DevOps background and like to stay close to the technical details: Kafka, Go, Docker and the operational realities of running systems in production. It helps me have meaningful conversations with my engineers, give them clear context and real ownership, and treat reliability and observability as first-class concerns so the platform can keep scaling without becoming harder to operate.
I’ve been at Batch long enough to see it grow from a single engineering team into a squad-based organization, a transition I was directly involved in through my project management role. Helping teams stay effective through that kind of change, while keeping a demanding production system healthy, is one of the parts of the job I find most rewarding.