In brief
I'm Mathieu ELIE, a freelance Elasticsearch and Elastic Stack consultant and trainer (ELK), based in Bordeaux, France. I've worked with Elasticsearch since 2011 and have focused on it full time since 2016. An Elastic Certified Engineer, I've delivered more than 160 training sessions and provide consulting, expertise and training in France and internationally, on site or remotely, in French and English.
BETWEEN THEORY AND PRACTICE
- I generally dedicate more than 50% of my time to production (real life).
- I have also delivered more than 160 training sessions on Elasticsearch / Elastic Stack.
- This allows me to share my experiences in training, to keep up to date with developments and to have a broader culture with the experience of multiple projects.
BORDEAUX AND THE REST OF THE WORLD
- I am originally from Bordeaux and remain based in this city.
- Nevertheless, I travel a lot for my services: Paris, the rest of France, Luxembourg, Switzerland...
- Remotely, I work with the entire world (USA, Belgium, India...).
MY JOURNEY
From development to databases, from startups to web agencies, from employee to freelancer, from production to training, from OPS to consulting, my journey has allowed me to explore many contexts.2000 -> FRONT -> BACK -> DATABASE
I started as a front-end developer (HTML / CSS / PHP) at a great online storage startup in Bordeaux, working on projects with millions of users. It was a lot of fun: playing music and flying RC helicopters with colleagues. It helped me develop a real enthusiasm for my job, IT and SaaS development, and a particular mindset: be cool and skilled at the same time.
I quickly moved to the backend team (still PHP) to work on an API used by the front end, desktop clients and external systems. It was only backend code, no more HTML / CSS.
2009 -> NOSQL / SCALABILITY
Then I moved to the database team working with PostgreSQL. I converted about a hundred API calls into stored procedures. It was the opportunity to work on clustering / sharding PostgreSQL so we could scale the service. It was really interesting because at that time NoSQL solutions were going mainstream to address exactly these challenges. I also worked on scalability, performance and architecture issues.
2010 -> CODE / PYTHON / FULL STACK
Then I joined a leading innovative web agency in Bordeaux as backend developer. I worked on rebuilding a web service from scratch in Python / Django, adding an API, async tasks (celery) and communication with external systems. It was the opportunity to build a complete project and quit PHP for Python, even though I had long dreamed of working with Ruby as a freelancer.
2011 -> FREELANCE !
In 2011 I took the opportunity to become a freelancer, and I still am today. It's the perfect setting for me to express my enthusiasm, with enough freedom to go to hackathons, conferences and meetups.
One of my first projects was a tech lead position at an art database startup in Paris. I was full stack (before the term was even used, I think) and worked on a nice stack: Ruby on Rails, CouchDB and... Elasticsearch!
2012 -> ELASTICSEARCH / PRESENTATIONS
Elasticsearch was not mainstream at that time. As my portfolio grew with it, new clients came to me on this topic, which strengthened my skills. I was excited about it and gave some talks in Bordeaux about Elasticsearch with real-time data visualization in the browser (see my talks). I still work with dataviz, and therefore with Kibana. Maybe one day I will be a data artist when I retire... or before!
2016 -> FULL ELASTIC STACK
Then in 2016 I decided to dedicate my time to Elasticsearch and Elastic technologies (Kibana, Beats, Logstash). It is still the case today. Demand is high, and the solution is complete and complex enough that I never get bored working with it. It is also the opportunity to deliver a lot of training as an instructor.
I deliver training on the Elastic Stack, sometimes many sessions in the same month.
On the consulting side, I do both short one-shot missions and long-term collaborations. I have many clients, CAC 40 companies, banks, startups, small companies and even other freelance consultants.
Training makes me travel a lot in France, Luxembourg, Belgium, Switzerland...
2025 -> ELASTIC CERTIFIED ENGINEER
In 2025, I earned the Elastic Certified Engineer certification, the official certification issued by Elastic. After more than ten years working with Elasticsearch, it was the opportunity to have my expertise officially validated, and to better support trainees preparing for it.
Today, my consulting and training cover the whole Elastic platform: search, logs and observability, security / SIEM and machine learning.
So what's next?
The next chapter is international. I already work with clients outside France and deliver my services in both French and English, on site or remotely. Still on Elastic technologies, in consulting and training. And who knows, maybe the next chapter will be written with you and your project?