Sometimes, the best career paths are the ones that don’t go as planned.
Passions and personal interests can start you in a specific direction and dictate the first steps, but there’s no telling where the rest of the journey will take you. Being flexible, curious and able to adapt are precious skills that can open the door to new and unexpected opportunities, especially for people with technical backgrounds who face the challenge of joining a more ‘traditional’ workforce.
Today we hear how this proved to be true for Clément Danjou, Engineering Director at Zama, in a new installment of ‘My Career as’, the tell-all series diving into the insights of Deep Tech professionals sharing advice, tips and opening up about the ups and downs of their experiences.
Clément Danjou is Engineering Director at Zama.
After years as a technical leader at companies like Gandi, known for its high standards in security and privacy, Clément Danjou became an independent contractor in 2017. He provided expertise as a technical leader for startups (AB Tasty, TICTALES, Hiboo, SportEasy, …) and large enterprises (LaPoste, Société Générale, …). In 2020, he joined Zama to lead blockchain projects, where he is now focused on building privacy-preserving technologies using Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE).
You can find Clément at https://x.com/immortofu or https://www.linkedin.com/in/clementdanjou/
“I think joining a startup is a natural path after school if you’re passionate about your work.”
Back in the early 2000s, I dreamed of working in the web industry as what we called “webmaster”.
I was both a graphic designer and a coder. I studied web technologies and graphic design in a public school in Belgium, and even spent a year at an art school. Soon after, I started a job as a web developer at a web agency. That was the start of my journey as a web engineer. Along the way, I connected with many people in the open-source community and joined companies focused on privacy and security. Over the years, I took on bigger responsibilities. I led teams, first on the technical side, and later as a manager, mentoring team members and doing 1:1s. Now, I’m an engineering manager. I lead both technically and by managing a team of 14 members, making sure we succeed together.
I think joining a startup is a natural path after school if you’re passionate about your work. You can dedicate a lot of time to projects with a lot of freedom, and this time, you actually get paid for it! What attracted me to Zama was the attention to privacy, a very sensitive topic that is often overlooked. For me, privacy is something that should protect individuals from control by both the state and big corporations. It prevents unwarranted surveillance, and ensures that our choices and data are not manipulated or exploited for power or profit, and it was great to find a startup actively engaged in this field.
Working for big companies would be more challenging for me; I’d need to adapt to a completely different environment. I tried later in my career and I found that it wasn’t a good fit for me.
My current role focuses on coordinating between team members and stakeholders. My primary responsibility is to balance what the team can deliver with what stakeholders expect. Setting clear priorities is crucial to ensure alignment and transparency. Clearly communicating what stakeholders can expect helps manage their expectations and prevent misunderstandings.
When your team grows overtime, you don’t realize that your team is bigger than a classic pizza team. At this stage, any event involving ‘the team’ means 10 to 15 people, which makes meetings less effective. With such a large group, participation tends to decline as individuals hesitate to speak up, and discussions become less dynamic. Many team members may feel less important or influential in decision-making, leading to disengagement and a lack of active contribution.
The solution is to organize meetings in smaller groups while maintaining the sense that we are all working together toward the same goal.
It’s difficult to say if and how this position will evolve in the future, there are so many variables to take into account. A position like mine is as managerial as it is technical, so anyone with the ambition to lead a technical team should work on both sets of skills. In my opinion, the most important aspect of leadership is actively listening to others. Leading a team is not about imposing your own choices but about gathering, understanding, and synthesizing the insights and perspectives of the team. A good leader ensures that everyone’s input is considered, identifies common ground, and guides the group toward well-informed decisions that reflect collective intelligence rather than individual authority.
