Every month, Hexa hosts an in-person fireside chat where a CTO shares their journey, learnings, and vision of the role.
Before the event, we film a short conversation to share their insights with those who can’t join us in person.
In this new episode of CTO Voices, Louis Pinsard (Cofounder and CTO at Dialog) sits down with Estelle Giuly, cofounder and CTO of Pivot, the modern source-to-pay platform for mid-market and enterprise teams.
Estelle’s path spans FinTech, HR Tech, and workflow automation, from Paris to New York, before co-founding Pivot in 2023. In less than two years, she grew the engineering team from 5 to 25 people, all while evolving her own role from hands-on engineer to the “conductor” coordinating the team’s performance.
What follows is a conversation about scaling fast, staying pragmatic, and building an engineering culture defined by speed, ownership, and excellence.
From builder to conductor
When Pivot began, Estelle shipped code every day. She knew the entire codebase and was in the weeds with the team. As the company grew, her responsibilities changed, with each phase demanding a different form of leadership:
Builder phase: coding daily, designing workflows, moving fast
Human scale: hiring, delegating, structuring
Technical scale: performance, incidents, observability, maintainability
Leadership scale: developer experience, team productivity, long-term architecture
Her job today is less about writing code and more about making sure that everyone else can write great code at speed and with clarity.
“I’m not the one playing the instruments anymore. I’m the one coordinating them. And at the end of the piece, I’m even more proud than if I had played it myself.”
A culture built on speed and excellence
Estelle describes Pivot’s engineering culture in two words: speed and excellence.
Practically, this shows up as:
Proactivity: taking initiative without being asked
Ownership: leading a topic end-to-end
Pragmatism: focusing relentlessly on what matters
This culture is one of the reasons Pivot has been able to convince demanding clients like Doctolib, Deezer, Malt, FlixBus, Voodoo, EcoVadis and more.
What “senior engineer” really means at Pivot
Pivot hires only senior engineers, but Estelle is very clear that seniority isn’t just about years of experience.
For her, a senior engineer is someone who can quickly identify the real problem, communicate clearly, prioritise well, and build with long-term maintainability in mind. Humility also plays a central role: knowing when to bring others in, when to ask for help, and how to align a team around a solution.
Scaling from 5 → 25 engineers without losing ownership
Pivot went from 5 to 25 engineers in a matter of months, forming four functional squads led by backend tech leads and supported by a cross-team frontend lead.
One surprising choice: the product team remained intentionally small.
For a long time, it was just one project owner and a UX designer. Only recently did Pivot hire its first PM.
The idea is simple: small product teams force clarity, direct communication, and strong ownership, which keeps the company fast even as it grows.
Making herself replaceable
In the early days she was a bottleneck, but as the team grew, she had to design herself out of the centre.
Before her maternity leave, she put systems in place: tech leads for proximity, strong ownership across ICs, clear documentation, and a distributed model for decision-making.
When she came back, her cofounder told her:
“The team ran smoothly without you — but it cannot progress as fast without you.”
A quiet proof that she built what great CTOs aim for: a team that functions independently, but accelerates with her leadership.
AI-agent ready > AI-first
Pivot isn’t an AI product, but it’s the backbone where clients plug their own AI agents into procurement workflows.
Enterprise teams want to own their data, their models, and their compliance constraints. Pivot gives them the infrastructure to do that, while still offering AI-powered features like OCR and analytics.
Some clients already use Pivot as the host for contract-negotiation AI agents.
AI internally: freedom with guardrails
Pivot introduced ChatGPT early and gives engineers freedom in their toolset. Backend engineers often use Claude or Copilot, while frontend engineers tend to prefer Cursor. The philosophy is to stay flexible and curious rather than mandate a single tool.
That said, the guardrails are real: strong manual code reviews, clear frontend and backend guidelines, and a culture of disciplined engineering.
Thanks for reading!
👉 Don’t miss our upcoming CTO Voices events, in-person gatherings for CTOs to connect, exchange, and share hard-won lessons.
📅 See all upcoming dates on Luma.
