Hello, I'm Michael.
I'm a technology leader with a strong background in engineering, product, and scaling organizations. I lead Engineering at Getaround to make carsharing easy and reliable. Over the years, I have grown an engineering team from 20 to 60 people, scaling both processes and technical foundations while maintaining agility and execution speed.
Beyond engineering, I actively participate in executive steering committees, shaping company-wide strategy and balancing technical decisions with business impact. I believe that to build truly great products, engineering leaders must deeply understand the business—its goals, challenges, and trade-offs—so they can make the right technical decisions to drive growth.
I don't think there's a one-size-fits-all approach to building engineering teams or systems—every company, product, and technology stack comes with its own unique constraints. The key is to understand those constraints, adapt, and strike the right balance between building robust, scalable systems and moving fast to experiment and deliver value.
I take immense satisfaction in building strong teams, solving problems, and delivering impact through technology. More than just writing code, engineering should always stay connected to user needs—every decision, from infrastructure to UI, should make the product more seamless and meaningful.
But above all, I'm a proud dad, which keeps me grounded and reminds me every day that there's more to life than just work.
Michael Bensoussan
Writing
- The Hidden Costs of Running a Global Engineering Team and Recipes for Mitigation (2025)Time zones kill engineering velocity in ways that aren't obvious until you're stuck with them. Drawing from real experience managing teams across US and European time zones, I break down the hidden costs of global engineering teams and share battle-tested ways to minimize the damage.
Professional Services
I occasionally provide advisory services to companies and startups looking for guidance in:
- ☑️ Engineering Management & Org Scaling – Helping teams scale effectively while maintaining agility and execution speed.
- ☑️ Product Strategy – Aligning engineering with business goals, roadmap planning, and execution.
- ☑️ Infrastructure, DevOps & Platform Scaling – Designing reliable, cost-effective architectures.
- ☑️ Hiring Engineers & Engineering Leaders – Helping companies attract and recruit top technical talent.
If you're looking for advice, feel free to reach out on LinkedIn.
Getaround Blog
I occasionally write about engineering, product, and business topics on the Getaround Engineering Blog.
Leadership
- Your Job is Not Just to Write Code (2021) - The importance of communication and collaboration in engineering.
- Hackday #4: Full Remote (2021) - Running a fully remote hackathon and lessons learned.
MySQL
- MySQL 8 Features (2021) - Key improvements like CTEs, window functions, and indexing enhancements.
- The Evolution of MySQL at Getaround (2017) - How MySQL evolved across versions, focusing on new developer features.
Performance & Monitoring
- Sidekiq Instrumentation (2017) - Enhancing background job monitoring with Sidekiq instrumentation.
Deprecated Projects
Over the years, I've worked on various side projects and open-source contributions. These projects are no longer actively maintained, but they reflect past experiments and interests.
Ruby & Rails
- Code Copy Ruby Ref (2018) - VSCode extension allowing you to copy the path to a class, method, or constant in Ruby.
- Black Hole Struct (2017) - A data structure similar to an OpenStruct allowing autovivification.
- Checkzilla (2014) - CLI allowing you to check and be notified of outdated software.
- Rails Frontend (2014) - Build a static frontend app with Ruby On Rails.
Video.js
- Video.js Progress Tips (2013) - A plugin for Video.js that displays tooltips on the progress bar.
- Video.js Google Analytics (2013) - A plugin for Video.js that integrates Google Analytics tracking.
Web & Application
- Darmanin ou Le Pen? (2021) - A small app where users guess whether a quote is from Gérald Darmanin or Marine Le Pen.
- Job Board (2010) - A simple moderated job board aggregator for listing and managing job postings.
- Last.fm to YouTube (2010) - A tool to convert Last.fm loved tracks into YouTube playlists.
Games
- Space Shooter (2011) - An experimental space shooter game developed using Crafty.js.
- td.coffee (2010) - An experimental tower defense game combining CoffeeScript and Processing.js.
Get in Touch
Feel free to reach out on LinkedIn.