Field engineer · Product leader · Entrepreneur · CTO
Understand what is real. Build with others.
I am a French engineer from Arts et Métiers and the CTO of GOWell, a Nasdaq-listed wireline technology company headquartered in Singapore. My work sits where subsurface data meets industrial AI: helping operators understand the condition of their wells, and of the infrastructure around them, before problems become failures.
Now: CTO at GOWell
GOWell provides wireline logging technology for well evaluation, integrity, and performance, serving oil and gas, geothermal, underground storage, and carbon storage projects worldwide. As CTO, I lead technology and product strategy, with a focus on well integrity and on turning logging data into decisions operators can act on.
Based in Singapore since 2026.
From the field up
I started on the rig floor. In 2006 I joined Schlumberger, now SLB, as a wireline field engineer, and spent more than fifteen years with the company across seven countries: Canada, the North Sea, Sakhalin in Russia, Congo, Angola, Houston, TX and Paris, France. I moved from field operations into commercial, operations, and digital roles, and later became Global Digital Strategy and Product Manager.
That path taught me that good technology starts with the people who use it at 3 a.m. on a wellsite. It also produced three patents in wireline services and well integrity.
Before SLB, I trained as an engineer through an apprenticeship at Arts et Métiers (ENSAM/ITII Bordeaux) with Ford Aquitaine Industries, where I earned a Six Sigma Black Belt.
Read my field engineer years
Building for industry
In 2021 I co-founded jll.spear in Bordeaux, France, with two childhood friends. The group brings together traditional industrial know-how and digital innovation to monitor and maintain industrial infrastructure:
- ase-serem / matelec: industrial maintenance for manufacturers in southwest France
- optim.aize: sovereign, open-source geospatial decision support, built on the Yaaps platform, for energy, industry, and insurance
- iidre: centimeter-level industrial geolocation using UWB and RTK
- sense-flow / drones-solutions: inspection and drone-based data acquisition for infrastructure modeling and structural analysis
I remain a co-founder and shareholder of the group.
How I work
I believe in being a human-centered entrepreneur: technology only creates value when it is designed around the people who operate, maintain, and depend on it. Decide clearly, then build the conditions for the team to succeed.
Milestones
- 2026: CTO, GOWell (Singapore)
- 2025 to 2026: Vice President, French Tech Périgord
- 2023 to 2025: Vice President and Treasurer, French Tech Bordeaux
- 2021: Co-founded jll.spear
- 2020: Digital Business Excellence Program, UC Berkeley Haas School of Business
What I want to share here
Industrial work is everywhere in our lives, yet it is rarely described by the people who do it.
This site is a place to make it more visible: to revisit situations I have lived through, explain activities few people know about, and share the questions they raise. From my early years as a field engineer to the changes industry is going through today, I am as interested in what we build as in how we build it.
Sebastien Roche
Patents
Co-inventor on three patent families filed with SLB, covering autonomous wellsite operations and secure data systems.
- Autonomous operations in oil and gas fields
European patent EP 4 025 767 B1, granted June 2026. Planning and autonomous execution of wellsite operations, driven by digital execution plans updated with sensor data. - Autonomous wireline operations in oil and gas fields
US application US 2022/0341307 A1, granted as US 12,091,960 B2 in September 2024. Selecting and planning the right wireline service to assess well barrier integrity. - Data system
European application EP 4 457 973 A1, published November 2024, pending. Secure computing on protected data, with access rules and results recorded on a blockchain.
French site.