Jean Senellart graduated from École Polytechnique and obtained a PhD in computer science in 1999. He joined SYSTRAN, where for 20 years as researcher, chief scientist and eventually CEO, he contributed to the transformation of the company from legacy rule-based to AI-driven technology. He is in particular one of the founders of OpenNMT, the most popular OSS for Neural Machine Translation.

Jean decided in 2021 to embark on a new challenge and joined Quandela as Chief Product Officer. His teams launched Perceval in 2022, an OSS for simulating photonic circuits, then Quandela Cloud giving access to the first-ever photonic QPU online end of 2022, and delivered in 2023 the first Quantum Computer to a private customer in France. In 2025, his teams released MerLin, an open-source software for hybrid quantum machine learning.

He is particularly interested in hybrid applications around Quantum Computing and machine learning also known as Quantum Machine Learning.