Safran

Safran is the French aerospace and defense group where Mike completed a three-year apprenticeship between September 2021 and September 2024. The role was "Alternant Développeur et Analyste de données Supply Chain" at the Moissy-Cramayel site in the southeastern Paris region.

The Apprenticeship

The Safran contract was an alternance agreement paired with the ESIEE Paris engineering degree. The arrangement alternated academic weeks at ESIEE with full working weeks at Safran's supply chain organization. It covered the full duration of the engineering program, including the Université du Québec en Outaouais exchange semester in late 2023.

Three years at a single host company is the maximum duration for a French engineering alternance. Mike completed the full term, finishing the degree and the contract in the same month.

Work Scope

The described responsibilities combine software engineering and data analysis:

• Project management of a web application
• Advanced use of JavaScript stack (ReactJS, Node.js) and SQL
• Data analysis with Talend and Power BI
• Construction of key performance indicators (KPIs) to support SAP migration

The SAP migration context places the work inside a large enterprise ERP transition. Building KPIs for that migration is a measurement task — instrumenting a change that was already underway — rather than architectural leadership. The React/Node web application likely served the internal supply chain team rather than external customers.

Stack Continuity

The React/Node/SQL combination from Safran maps directly onto the TypeScript/Next.js dominance of the later Solo Founder Era. The Safran years were where the JavaScript ecosystem became Mike's primary stack. The data analysis layer (Talend, Power BI) did not carry forward into commercial products.

SAP and Talend are enterprise tools that do not reappear in any founder-era project. The retained skill from Safran is the full-stack JavaScript capability, not the enterprise data integration tooling.

Transition Out

The Safran contract ended in September 2024, the same month the ESIEE degree was awarded. The Solo Founder Era did not begin cleanly at this point — hogwarts_artifacts_online (October 2024), the most professional academic repository, sat between the end of the apprenticeship and the first commercial product launches. The transition from corporate employee to solo founder took several months to fully crystallize.