During one's career, you come across some remarkable people. Michel is one of them during my 15-year career. He impressed us right from the first interview until his last day.

Michel's done a superb job at Takealot: He had a direct bearing on categorically improving our search, recommender and event tracking systems. He's not afraid to tread outside of his domain to fix and improve things.

He saw the opportunity to apply for the team lead position as a member of the team when he realised the struggle during recruitment because of the unique combination of skills we were looking for. Not only did he master the role, but improved the team in several ways by ensuring the team delivered quality work, on time, presented well at sprint reviews, while also creating new opportunities with our incubation days.

Besides being smart and innovative, the trait I value most is his pragmatism. This strikes just the right balance between themodellingng aspect of ML and building high-performance ML systems for our platform. He understands ML in depth, it's applications, and is a solid software engineer. He can explain various and difficult concepts well.

But, leading by example, he also doesn't try to do everything himself and successfully managed several projects and his team to get the best out of them. Michel is a pleasant, thoughtful and kind person. Albeit a young team lead, he had the necessary charisma and ambition to learn (and a fast learner he is). He did a good job mentoring his team members, performing regular one-on-ones and handling their performance reviews. He had his team's back (when needed) and they had his. He communicates clearly and had good relationships with everyone outside of his team, in particular, the product managers.

I would work with Michel any day again.