Loïc Formont
Senior Solutions Architect
Summary
Senior Solutions Architect at MongoDB and former Head of Presales, with 18+ years of experience at the intersection of data, enterprise architecture and customer-facing technology. I combine business discovery, value selling, solution design, data modeling, cloud architecture and hands-on technical work to help customers build secure, resilient and scalable platforms.
Experience
01/2025 - Present
Senior Solutions Architect — MongoDB
Advise enterprise customers on data architecture and application modernization with MongoDB Atlas. Work with Sales, Customer Success, partners and engineering teams to translate business requirements into secure, resilient and scalable architectures across AWS, Azure and Google Cloud.
- Lead discovery, architecture, data modeling and sizing workshops for strategic enterprise accounts
- Design high availability, disaster recovery, networking, security, migration and observability patterns for MongoDB Atlas
- Support transactional, search, vector search, streaming and AI workloads from initial design through adoption
- Build reusable demonstrations, technical plans and enablement material for customers and internal teams
09/2023 - 01/2025
Head of Presales — Astran
Led the Presales practice and managed one Solution Engineer. Reported to a founder and worked closely with Marketing and R&D to bring Presales best practices to enterprise customers. Also led the Customer Success practice to support successful deployments for existing customers.
- Cooperated with the founders to renew existing customers and close new business
- Documented Presales processes in Notion
- Helped define the company strategy and participated in the company pivot
- Worked closely with developers and product managers to improve and stabilize the product
- Secured multiple enterprise account deals
10/2021 - 08/2023
Head of Presales — Toucan
Gradually recruited four Solution Engineers (two in Europe and two in the US) and one intern to build and run an effective Presales practice. Reported to the VP Sales and worked closely with the executive team and the leaders of BDR, Customer Success, Operations and Customer Care. Created and documented the Presales approach, mindset and processes, and implemented activity management and monitoring tools.
- Cooperated with talented Account Executives and Customer Success Managers to close six-figure new business, upsell and cross-sell deals
- Set up Presales management tools using Notion, Zapier and Salesforce, together with activity and performance monitoring
- Scaled the Presales practice across Europe and the US
- Developed the Solution Engineering team toward autonomy and strong Presales performance
- Handed deals over to onboarding, partners, Professional Services and Customer Success teams to support customer outcomes
- Influenced 58% of new ARR as a team
- Built core ICP demonstrations to support Product Marketing and Sales teams
02/2021 - 10/2021
Senior Presales Solution Engineer — Toucan
Joined as the first Presales hire and independently supported the European Sales team of 12 Account Executives. Used data storytelling to help customers understand their data and make better decisions. Reported to the VP Sales and created the initial Presales approach at Toucan.
- Ramped up on the product and messaging in one month and supported 12 Account Executives for eight months
- Closed the first deal after three months
- Built the foundations of the Presales practice
03/2012 - 02/2021
Senior Presales Solution Architect — Qlik
Started in Presales for the French OEM market, then moved to mid-market and strategic accounts. Worked in tandem with sales representatives to define consistent Sales and Presales strategies for complex accounts. Specialized in architecture, data modeling, integration, APIs and high-volume use cases.
- Spoke to audiences of more than 300 people at marketing events
- Designed, built and operated a 20+ server AWS and Azure demonstration platform for the French Presales team
- Received multiple innovation awards
- Cooperated with talented sales representatives to close seven-figure deals
- Contributed to specialist teams for Insight Bot, Qlik Sense on Kubernetes and Qlik Catalog
- Maintained close relationships with R&D, Product Management, specialist engineering and Support teams
10/2007 - 03/2012
BI Consultant — Capgemini
Started as a Business Intelligence functional consultant, progressed to an advanced Microsoft BI consultant and later became a QlikView expert consultant.
- Served as functional lead for a two-year data warehouse program involving six consultants
- Served as technical lead for Capgemini's global internal Business Intelligence platform
Education
Ensimag
10/2004 - 06/2007
Master of Science Computer Science and Applied Mathematics
- Data Algorithms
- Optimization
- Statistics
- C
- C++
- ADA
- VHDL
- TCP/IP
Université Joseph-Fourier
10/2006 - 06/2007
Master of Science Bioinformatics
- Biology
- Cell
- DNA sampling
- Metabolism
- Imaging
Awards
EMEA Unsung Hero of the Year
Qlik
Supporting the organization & individuals on new Qlik products in the shadows without taking credits.
EMEA Innovation Award of the Year
Qlik
Building a Qlik Sense log parser to extract lineage data that can be used in the governance dashboard.
EMEA Innovation Award of the Year
Qlik
Building a distributed map-reduce engine based on Qlik Sense associative single server engine.
World Innovation Award of the Year
Qlik
Inventing and building a new approach for Big Data @Qlik: On-Demand-App-Generation.
Publications
Comparison of anisotropic atomic motions in biological macromolecules
01/2008
PAMM
A compact and convenient graphical technique for assessing agreement between spatial atomic distributions in large molecules determined from alternate sources is presented. The procedure is available as downloadable software. (© 2008 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)