FIG.01 Arach Tchoupani
Engineer, founder
About
I'm an engineer and founder. For fifteen years I've built products and the teams behind them, at seed-stage startups in New York and Montreal, a company I co-founded, and Meta. I've been building software I wish existed, and now I'm gearing up for my next venture.
- Years shipping
- 15+
- Teams built
- 0 → 50+
- Exit
- Breathe Life
( 01 ) Now
2024 — presentAfter a decade of leading engineering orgs, I took a technical sabbatical in 2024 to get back to building things myself. Most of my time goes into Talkie, a native voice-to-action app, and the small tools I make along the way. I also help friendly startups as a fractional tech lead.
What I keep coming back to is AI-native development: what changes when one person working with agents has the leverage of a whole team. I write about it here.
( 02 ) Path
Full resume →- 2024 — Present Remote
- 2022 — 2023 New York, NY
Meta
Engineering Manager
Joined to work on Bulletin, a newsletter and publishing service. Led through a major shift towards Creators on FB.
- 2018 — 2021 Montreal, Canada
Breathe Life Acquired by Zinnia
Chief Technology Officer & Co-Founder
Co-founded and led engineering from zero to successful acquisition. Onboarded 10+ life insurance carriers, raised $15M+, hired 50+ across US and Canada.
- 2016 — 2017 Montreal, Canada
Starbucks (via C3)
Tech Lead
Started the firm (C3) that led the redesign and launch of Starbucks' global packaged goods e-commerce websites.
- 2015 — 2016 New York, NY
PhotoShelter
Vice-President, Engineering
Joined to improve partnership with product and sales functions and grow the engineering team. PhotoShelter hosts 15 petabytes of data, 800M+ photo/video assets from 80,000 pros and 1,300 organizations.
- 2014 — 2015 New York, NY
Primary.com
CTO
Joined the NY based team at seed stage, employee #2. Company raised $45M from top VCs and has shipped products to more than 1 million customers since launch.
- 2011 — 2014 New York, NY
Lot18
Engineering Manager to Director to CTO
Joined at seed stage as senior engineer. Promoted multiple times from lead to CTO. Launched the first personalized wine club in the US.
- 2006 — 2011 Montreal, Canada
Outbox Technology
Software Engineer
Joined the company pre-launch white label ticketing platform. By 2011, AEG & Outbox partnered to create AXS.com, rolled out in 100+ venues worldwide. 500M+ tickets sold to date.
( 03 ) Building
arach.dev ↗- Talkie Native voice-to-action. Push-to-talk, on-device Whisper, multi-provider LLM routing. Swift · SwiftUI · local Whisper · Claude/OpenAI/Groq
- HUD Chrome-style UI components for canvas apps. Pan/zoom, panels, command palette, terminal drawer. React · TypeScript · canvas rendering · component library
- Devmux Claude Code + dev server in tmux. Auto-detects stack, session persistence, menu bar companion. Shell · tmux · Bun · macOS menu bar
( 04 ) Outside work
- 2007 — 2011
Montréal Python
Founder & Co-Organizer
Started the group and co-organized activities for the first few years. Now 5,000 members strong and hosted global PyCon in 2014-15.
- 2018 — 2020
FuturPreneur
Mentor
Mentored a team of young entrepreneurs through their early entrepreneurial milestones.
- 2018 — 2020
McGill Dobson Centre
X-1 Accelerator Mentor & Dobson Cup Judge
Mentored founding teams at McGill's X-1 Accelerator program and served as semi-finalist judge for the Dobson Cup startup competition.
- 2018 — 2020
FounderFuel
Mentor
Offered feedback and strategy consulting sessions to teams in various cohorts.
- 2007
Ecole Polytechnique de Montréal
Bachelor's Degree, Software Engineering
( 05 ) Say hello
Open to conversationsBuilding something ambitious? Let's talk.
I'm gearing up for my next venture. If you're working on something interesting, assembling a founding team, or want to compare notes on agents and tools, I'd like to hear from you.