Sebastian Florez — Timeline
I am a Mechanical Engineer with a Ph.D. in Computational Mechanics, working as a Senior Software Engineer and Product Owner at Amadeus in Sophia Antipolis, France. I grew up in Bucaramanga, Colombia, studied across two countries, built research software for materials science, and then crossed into industry as a software professional.
The timeline below covers six positions — from student researcher to product owner — across three organisations. On the education side: four degrees earned across Colombia and France between 2011 and 2020. The skills section lists the tooling that has mattered in practice. The last two sections cover what fills the time outside of work and what this blog is for.
Career
Product Owner & Senior Software Developer — Amadeus, Sophia Antipolis · 2023–present
Back at Amadeus, now owning the product roadmap while staying close to the code. The role sits at the intersection of technical direction and business delivery — deciding what gets built, why, and making sure the engineering holds up. The challenge is maintaining honest engineering standards while the organisation pulls toward speed.
Senior Software Engineer — TechSoft3D, Sophia Antipolis · 2022–2023
CAE team. Geometry processing, mesh pipelines, and high-performance solvers surfaced through APIs and web interfaces. The work connected directly to what the Ph.D. taught about numerical methods — but the constraints were different: reliability in production, not elegance on paper.
Software Developer — Amadeus, Sophia Antipolis · 2021–2022
First industry role outside of research. Joined the ticketing service team and made the full shift from scientific computing to commercial software engineering. The transition clarified that software engineering is a discipline of its own — not a side skill scientists happen to pick up.
Ph.D. Researcher & Post-Doctoral Developer — CEMEF, MINES ParisTech, Sophia Antipolis · 2017–2021
Four years at the Centre for Material Forming. The doctoral work focused on numerical methods for the simulation of microstructural evolutions during metal forming — specifically the development of a Front-Tracking model called ToRealIMotion, integrated into the DIGIMU industrial software. After defending in 2020, I stayed on as a post-doctoral developer to bring the model to production quality. Nine peer-reviewed publications came out of this period, in journals including Acta Materialia, Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering, and Modelling and Simulation in Materials Science and Engineering.
Student Researcher — LEM3 Laboratory, University of Lorraine, Metz · 2016–2017
Measurement and modelling of thermal properties of bone. Part of the M.Sc. year, working in the mechanics and materials lab alongside the coursework.
Student Researcher — GIEMA, Industrial University of Santander · 2014–2015
Research group in energy and heat transfer. My first contact with research as a practice — writing up experiments, reading papers, learning that intuition requires verification.
Education
Ph.D. in Computational Mechanics — MINES ParisTech, PSL · 2017–2020
Thesis on Front-Tracking methods for the numerical simulation of grain boundary migration during recrystallisation and grain growth in polycrystalline metals. Supervised at CEMEF, Sophia Antipolis. The doctoral years taught me that a clean abstraction is worth more than a fast implementation, and that both are worth very little without rigorous verification.
M.Sc. in Mechanics, Materials and Structures — University of Lorraine · 2016–2017
Graduated mention très bien (GPA 16.15 / 20). First serious contact with scientific computing at scale — and with the gap between a textbook formulation and production code.
General Engineer in Mechanics and Materials — National Engineering School of Metz (ENSEM) · 2015–2017
French grande école engineering degree, specialised in mechanics and materials. Graduated mention très bien (GPA 16.30 / 20). This was the French side of the double-degree programme with the Universidad Industrial de Santander — the arrangement that brought me to Metz in 2015.
B.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering — Industrial University of Santander, Colombia · 2011–2017
Undergraduate foundation in thermodynamics, solid and fluid mechanics, materials, and mathematics. The degree ran concurrently with the ENSEM programme in France: I left Colombia in 2015 as part of the double-degree arrangement and completed both the B.Sc. and the French diplôme d'ingénieur simultaneously in 2017. Graduated Cum Laude (GPA 4.21 / 5.0).
Skills
Languages used daily or in production: C++, C, Python, shell scripting. Tooling: GDB/LLDB, CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, Azure DevOps, GitLab CI), Linux system administration. Technical areas: numerical methods, geometry processing, mesh generation, data pipelines, machine learning as a practical tool.
Human languages: Spanish (native), French (C1), English (C1).
Beyond Work
I run, cycle, and swim — training toward triathlons without illusions about podium finishes. Endurance sport shares a structure with engineering: set a goal with a long horizon, break it into measurable sessions, keep showing up. The main difference is that bonking on a long ride gives immediate and unambiguous feedback.
Most personal projects start with a problem, pass through a CAD tool, and end on the print bed. 3D printing removed the barrier between having an idea and having a physical object. I also run a home server stack — automation, monitoring, self-hosted services — which is a useful sandbox for things that would be too costly to break in production.
I share the flat with a Bengal cat who arrived in 2025 with enough energy to be unreasonable about it. He replaced the quiet left by my first cat, who died of cancer that same year.
This Blog
I write about software architecture, computational mechanics, simulation, 3D modelling, training, and whatever earns sustained attention. No editorial calendar. If something is here it is because I thought it was worth the time to write it down — which is the only filter that has worked consistently.