Open to opportunities
ITSM & Application Manager
Major incident and problem management • Application integration • Automation & AI
When a critical application goes down in a bank, someone has to take charge: open the crisis bridge, align the technical teams, keep the business and the regulator informed, then make sure it does not happen again. That has been my job for more than ten years in the Luxembourg financial sector.
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Three trades that answer one another: holding a service together when it falls over, running it day to day, and taking the repetitive work out of it.
When a critical service goes down, someone has to take charge.
Open the crisis bridge, coordinate the technical teams, keep the business and the regulator informed, then drive the root cause analysis so the incident does not come back. Ten years of P1/P2 in Luxembourg banks subject to DORA and supervised by the CSSF.
An application does not live alone: it holds together through what connects it to the rest.
Install, deploy, maintain and monitor business applications; be the single point of contact between the business, the technical teams and the vendors. From the service catalogue to the SLAs, from CI/CD pipelines to releases: the work that makes an application operable, not merely delivered.
What a machine can do twice, it should do on its own.
Manual ITSM reporting turned into an automated flow, operational tasks handed to a scheduler, deployments moved into pipelines. I apply the same logic to generative AI: processes designed around it and then automated, MCP servers implemented to wire an assistant onto real tools, and models tried out both self-hosted and at the major providers. The homelab is the testing ground; this site is one of the products.
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Experienced IT Service Management specialist with over 15 years of professional experience in the financial sector, including major Luxembourg banks and European institutions. My ground: major incident handling, problem management and continuous service improvement.
ITIL 5 certified and ITIL 4 Practitioner in incident management, I bring a structured, autonomous and results-driven approach, with strong communication skills and a clear focus on operational excellence and compliance.
I work daily in environments subject to DORA and supervised by the CSSF, where traceability, the quality of post-mortems and reliable reporting are not optional.
The rest of the time, I automate. Repetitive ITSM reporting, operational tasks, deployments - and my own tooling, on a homelab that serves as a testing ground for the technologies I will later meet in production. That is where I learned to put AI assistants to work rather than watch them from a distance.
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Eleven years of assignments in the Luxembourg financial sector.
Since may 2026
IT Family · Freelance consultant
Client : Luxembourg bank (undisclosed)
Aug 2024 - Apr 2026
STRAS Luxembourg · Consultant
Client : BIL
Oct 2023 - Apr 2024
CTG Luxembourg PSF · Consultant
Client : ex-RBC
Jan 2022 - Oct 2023
CTG Luxembourg PSF · Consultant
Client : Northern Trust
Jun 2021 - Dec 2021
KPMG Luxembourg · In-house
Feb 2019 - May 2021
CTG Luxembourg PSF · Consultant · Luxembourg
Client : Société Générale Bank & Trust
Feb 2018 - Feb 2019
GEN II Luxembourg Services S.à r.l. · In-house
Jan 2017 - Feb 2018
FE fundinfo · In-house · Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg
Jul 2015 - Dec 2016
Halian Europe · In-house · Luxembourg
Client : European Investment Bank
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From the crisis bridge down to the infrastructure running underneath.
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Completed training and credentials currently in force.
PeopleCert · August 2026
PeopleCert · July 2026
PeopleCert · 2020
ISTQB
The Linux Foundation (edX)
eFront - FE fundinfo
Professional training
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What I built beyond the job description: processes, management tooling and a few personal projects.
CTG Luxembourg PSF - client ex-RBC
Designed and rolled out a standardised communication process for major incidents: message templates, update cadence, recipient matrix. The intended and achieved outcome: more transparency and a reduced time to resolution.
Northern Trust and ex-RBC - ServiceNow
Designed dashboards and scheduled reports for L2/L3 teams across Incident, Request, Change and Problem processes. Manual reporting became an automated flow, and incident trends became readable for management.
CTG Luxembourg PSF - client ex-RBC
Led the hardening of the MFT TA Gateway lines, carried out in three successive levels: whitelisting of client IP addresses, then two-factor SSH authentication with key and password, then end-to-end GPG encryption. Each level adds a barrier independent of the previous ones.
Northern Trust
Worked on the service catalogue and Configuration Items to draft new SLAs for support activities - the building block that makes a service commitment measurable rather than declarative.
KPMG Luxembourg
Set up the deployment of new applications through Azure DevOps and CI/CD pipelines, coordinating with project managers, operations teams and vendors.
European Investment Bank - via Halian Europe
Automated operational tasks through a scheduler (Autosys) and shell scripting, with end-to-end application monitoring: databases, file systems, uptime.
Personal project - tooling and homelab
Implementation of MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers to wire an AI assistant onto real tools and data; design of processes built around generative AI, then automation of those processes. Alongside that, a comparative evaluation of self-hosted models and models from the major providers, to know which one fits which use.
Personal project - SaaS backend
Multi-tenant API for premium property managers, family offices and corporate housing: properties, bookings, inventory, cleaning tasks with photo checklists, transactions and an owner portal. Twelve data models, JWT authentication, API keys, all containerised. It is the engine running behind Palm Villas.
palm-villas.gpUnder construction
Showcase site and booking engine for a group of villas in Guadeloupe. The public face presents the offer to travellers; behind it, Trousseau handles the operation - properties, bookings, housekeeping, finances. The two projects form one chain, from the CRM to the page that sells.
tracypalie-osteopathie.fr
Bilingual thirty-page static site with no framework and no database: presentation, pricing, three practices, appointment booking through Doctolib and Doctena, long-form articles and per-town local pages. Page generator written in Python, deployed to GitHub Pages on a custom domain.
assomontaigne.fr and compta.assomontaigne.fr
Two self-hosted services for a non-profit, open source from end to end: HedgeDoc for collaborative writing, Paheko for accounting. And above all the chain connecting them: a member photographs a receipt and submits it through a form; the document is archived, Tesseract extracts the accounting entry, which lands pending validation. Confirmations and per-event financial reports are generated automatically. The committee validates instead of re-typing: that much less admin for volunteers.
Personal project - Unraid
Unraid server and containerised self-hosted services (Paperless-ngx document management, NGINX reverse proxy, backups). The lab where I break things before meeting them in production.
gael.palie.fr
Bilingual static site built with Astro and Tailwind CSS, deployed automatically by GitHub Actions on every push. Designed together with Claude - the details are right below.
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What the people I worked with have to say - managers, clients and technical teams.
« Gaël has an adaptability and a know-how that made him a valued member of our organisation. »Read the full recommendationCollapse
I had the pleasure of working with Gaël in a context where a demanding client was part of the picture.
Gaël has an adaptability and a know-how that made him a valued member of our organisation.
I warmly recommend him, and I am certain he will progress quickly.
- March 2019
« He always stays calm, even under pressure. »Read the full recommendationCollapse
I worked with Gaël within European institutions.
Gaël is a hard worker and a fast learner. He has team spirit and always stays calm, even under pressure.
He has many skills across different domains: monitoring, operating systems (Linux and Windows), ticketing tools, and even management.
It was a pleasure to be in the same team as him.
- January 2019
« Real team spirit, stress-resistant and customer-focused. »Read the full recommendationCollapse
I had the opportunity to collaborate for several months with Gaël within a European institution.
He really has good team spirit, he is stress-resistant and customer-focused. Through his experiences he has acquired a versatility and technical skills that are reflected in his work - essential qualities to adapt to all situations.
- February 2019
« Always proactive in answering his colleagues’ IT needs, as soon as he became aware of them. »Read the full recommendationCollapse
Gaël is a colleague who was always proactive in answering his colleagues’ IT needs, as soon as he became aware of them.
It was a real pleasure to work with him.
- February 2019
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Let me be straightforward: I did not write this site line by line. I directed it.
I am not a front-end developer, and I am not going to pretend otherwise on my own CV. This site was designed with Claude, Anthropic's assistant, from my CV and my instructions: structure, content, tone, technical trade-offs, hosting.
What that says about me is not "I cheated" but "I know how to integrate". Taking a tool, understanding what it can do, steering it, checking its work, correcting what is wrong and shipping something that holds up in production: that is exactly the job I have been doing for fifteen years, applied here to the web rather than to a banking application chain.
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Define the need, the audience and the constraints - private repo, custom domain, bilingual, static and with no server dependency.
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Provide the raw material (CV, certifications, achievements), settle the architecture choices and reject whatever does not fit.
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Review the content line by line: no invented experience, no embellished certification, no personal data published by accident.
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Automated build, continuous deployment, versioned in Git. What is not reproducible is not shipped.
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An assignment, a role, or simply a question about major incident management? Drop me a line.
I am regularly approached for integration work, on Fiverr and directly. Automating a process, wiring an AI assistant onto your tools through an MCP server, industrialising a reporting flow, driving an application version upgrade: if it is integration work, let us talk.