Jul 2024 – Nov 2025 · 1 yr 4 mos · Paris, Île-de-France, France · Remote

• Arcee AI is an AI research lab with a commercial focus. My role requires both executive leadership and daily hands-on engineering to deliver enterprise AI solutions built with open-weight small language models, while contributing to the wider AI community through talks, technical content, and industry partnerships.
• Engineering & Deployment
• Benchmark and deploy language models across CPU, GPU, and AI accelerator platforms, optimizing inference performance for partner and customer environments. Recognized by Arm as an Arm Ambassador for my work in AI inference optimization on Arm architectures.
• Package and deploy models into partner cloud services and hardware platforms for reliable enterprise deployments.
• Code high-visibility demonstrations, such as the Cisco Live AI showcase, to support partner collaboration and customer adoption.
• Strategic & Technical Leadership
• Guide enterprise AI initiatives by combining business strategy with hands-on work, helping customers implement practical business outcomes.
• Build and maintain strategic partnerships with AWS, Intel, Arm, and Cisco, contributing to joint projects, product integrations, and GTM initiatives.
• Act as the first user of in-development products, providing detailed feedback that influences roadmap decisions and improves usability.
• Support pre-sales engagements with technical insight.
• Thought Leadership & Industry Engagement
• Create deep technical content: blog posts, industry insights, code, etc.
• Grow my YouTube channel (425,000 subscribers)
• Speak at conferences, industry events, and institutions.
• Technical Environment: generative AI models, open-source frameworks (RAG, agents, model merging, model distillation, etc.), AI hardware and software for model training and inference, multi-cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP), on-premise.

Oct 2021 – Jul 2024 · 2 yrs 9 mos · Paris, Île-de-France, France · On-site

• Drive enterprise AI adoption and strategic partnerships, combining executive leadership with hands-on technical expertise to accelerate Fortune 500 digital transformation.
• Technical Innovation & Product Strategy
• Optimized transformer inference performance across diverse hardware platforms (Intel/Arm CPUs, Nvidia/AMD GPUs, specialized AI accelerators including Graphcore, Habana Labs, Trainium, Inferentia)
• Served as technical lead on enterprise deployment projects, ensuring the integration of open-source AI solutions in production environments.
• Led technical engagement with Fortune 500 decision-makers, architecting private infrastructure deployments (VPC, on-premise) that drove multi-million dollar revenue opportunities
• Strategic Enterprise Leadership
• Conducted 250+ executive customer meetings across 13 EMEA countries and 8 US cities, directly contributing to pipeline generation and market expansion
• Initiated and executed strategic partnerships with cloud hyperscalers and hardware vendors (AWS, Azure, Google, Intel, AMD), expanding market reach and technical capabilities
• Executive Presence & Market Authority
• Created comprehensive technical content strategy (blogs, videos, demos) that established company thought leadership and developer community engagement.
• Delivered keynotes at international conferences and industry events (AWS, IBM, AMD, Microsoft) and prestigious institutions (UNESCO, NY Fed)
• Engaged with global media (TV, radio, press) as a company spokesperson, significantly expanding brand visibility and market credibility
• Technical Environment: Transformer models, open-source AI frameworks (RAG, agents, etc.), distributed training/inference systems, multi-cloud architectures (AWS, Azure, GCP), hardware acceleration platforms

Oct 2015 – Sep 2021 · 5 yrs 11 mos · Greater Paris Metropolitan Region

• 10/2015 - 02/2017: Principal Technical Evangelist (France, Amazon level 7)
• 02/2017 - 04/2021: Principal Technical Evangelist, AI & ML (global role, level 7)
• 04/2021 - 09/2021: Senior Principal Technical Evangelist, AI & ML (global role, promoted to level 8)
• Helped AWS customers worldwide understand and adopt the AWS AI/ML service portfolio. Built a wealth of deep technical content (blogs, videos, demos). Authored the first book on Amazon SageMaker, "Learn Amazon SageMaker”.
• Gave 500+ talks in nearly 40+ countries (AWS events, Velocity, ODSC, etc.). Spoke regularly with the international press and briefed industry analysts (Gartner, Forrester).
• Took part in hundreds of 1:1 sessions with AWS customers, from technical teams to C-level at Fortune 500 companies.
• Worked directly with many AWS service teams (EC2, AI/ML, Big Data) to incorporate customer feedback and improve services before launch. Helped launch over 70 services (blog posts, developer resources, etc.)
• Was promoted in 2021 to Amazon level 8, the equivalent of a Director level for individual contributors —an extremely rare achievement at Amazon. Was the second most senior technical evangelist at AWS after AWS Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr. Was named #1 AI Evangelist by AI Magazine in 2021.
• Technical Environment: all things AWS (10 AWS certifications), DevOps, big data, machine learning, deep learning (PyTorch, TensorFlow, CV, NLP), transformers, AI hardware (GPU, Inferentia, Trainium).

Oct 2014 – Oct 2015 · 1 yr · Paris · On-site

• Led software, infrastructure, and big data (70 engineers in Paris and San Francisco) for viadeo.com, a professional social network with 10M members.
• Initiated and completed an all-in migration and refactoring of a 200-server datacenter platform to AWS.
• Technical Environment: frontend and backend software (Node.js, Java), databases and big data (MySQL, HBase, Spark, Redshift, EMR), machine learning (clustering, classification), data centers, AWS.

Feb 2014 – Oct 2014 · 8 mos · Paris

• Managed a team of 130 engineers responsible for software engineering (OS, apps & web) and infrastructure for all Aldebaran robots.
• Reorganized the distressed team and deployed Agile methods, improving development efficiency.
• Against all odds, launched the world-famous Pepper robot in Tokyo in June.
• Technical Environment: C++, Python, embedded Linux, AI (speech and vision), Amazon Web Services.

Oct 2010 – Jan 2014 · 3 yrs 3 mos · Paris

• Led software, infrastructure, and big data (60 engineers) for an AdTech SaaS platform used by over 3,000 retailers in 30+ countries. Over 20B HTTP requests are processed daily by ML-powered applications (e.g., real-time bidding).
• Managed a 30M€ annual budget for 7 data centers in Europe, the US, and Japan. Implemented a global Disaster Recovery Plan (availability > 99.95%). Owned the IT compliance work required for the Nasdaq IPO in October 2013.
• Built a 6PB Hadoop cluster for big data and machine learning (the largest of its kind in Europe at the time).
• Technical environment: frontend and backend software (C#, C++, Apache, Nginx, ZeroMQ, Kafka, Redis, Couchbase), Linux and Windows automation (Puppet, Chef), databases (SQL Server, MongoDB), big data (Hadoop, HBase, Spark), machine learning (CTR prediction algorithms), high availability, load balancing, and data centers.

May 2009 – Sep 2010 · 1 yr 4 mos · Paris

• In charge of a B2B/B2C e-commerce platform generating 2 billion Euros of annual gross merchant value.
• Managed 150 engineers. Deployed agile project management. Implement ISO 9001 and ITIL.
• Owner of the IT budget (6M€ per year). Reduced OPEX by 20% through better supplier management.
• Technical Environment: PHP, Java, Oracle 10g, MySQL, NetApp NAS, Cisco, Linux, data centers.

Mar 2007 – Apr 2009 · 2 yrs 1 mo · Paris

• Managed software engineering and infrastructure for a SaaS platform used by major music companies (Universal, Sony, Warner). Grew the technical team from 12 to 50 people.
• Designed and deployed a new 2M€ technical platform (2 hosting locations, 150 servers). Implemented a
• Disaster Recovery Plan (availability > 99.9%). Implemented an ISO 27001 Information Security Management System.
• Technical Environment: Java, Oracle 10g, Isilon NAS, Cisco, audio/video transcoding, Linux, data centers.

Sep 2006 – Feb 2007 · 5 mos

• As a consultant for a pre-funding startup working on the A-GPS SIM, the world’s first Assisted-GPS module for SIM cards :
• Based on a first hardware prototype, wrote the software specification of the A-GPS SIM product.
• Led technical discussions at management level and R&D level with suppliers (software, semiconductors, manufacturing) and partners (smartcard silicon vendors, smartcard manufacturers).
• Attended high-level meetings with private & institutional VCs.
• Technical environment : GPS chipsets & software stacks, semi-conductors, manufacturing, SIM & smartcard standards

Jan 2002 – Sep 2006 · 4 yrs 8 mos · Greater Paris Metropolitan Region

• 09/2003-09/2006 :
• Led the development of all Telecom products (45 people in France + 25 in China and the Philippines)
• Reorganized R&D teams to sustain a 60% yearly increase of delivered card volumes
• Enforced ISO 9001:2000 methodology (yearly internal & external audits)
• Delivered in 2003 the first implementation of the WIB 1.3 micro-browser to pass the SmartTrust certification
• Delivered in 2004 the first USIM smartcard approved by the Vodafone Group, beating Gemplus and Axalto
• Delivered in 2005 the first USIM smartcard approved by Cingular, beating Gemplus and Axalto
• Traveled in Asia to perform a thorough technical due diligence of I'M Technologies (acquired by OCS in mid-2006)
• 01/2002-09/2003 :
• Led an 8-people team in charge of custom SIM application development, mostly for European Mobile Network Operators : SFR, Orange, TIM, Telefonica, Vodafone UK, etc.
• Enforced ISO 9001:1994 methodology (yearly internal & external audits)
• Delivered a full implementation of the SmartTrust Wireless Internet Browser 1.2 application, the first to be certified by SmartTrust.
• Delivered a full 2G SIM card to Vodafone UK, with RSA cryptography, lots of proprietary features and multiple JavaCard applications.
• Delivered tens of custom applications at a rapid pace, enabling the standard product to meet specific customer requirements (extension of 2G/3G standards, proprietary features, additional cryptography, etc)
• Technical environment : embedded C, assembly, Java Card, 16/32-bit chips (Atmel, Infineon, ST Micro, Samsung, etc.), smartcard & telecom standards (ISO, ETSI, 3GPP), WAP, cryptography, ISO 9001.

Jun 2000 – Dec 2001 · 1 yr 6 mos · Paris

• Co-founded a consulting company specialized in object technologies for embedded systems.
• Defined the strategy : missions, technologies, customers.
• Hired 10 people in 12 months, achieving in 2001 a profitable turnover of 750K€.
• Missions led in person:
• Oberthur Card Systems (1 year) : designed and implemented multiple JavaCard applications for the Identity & E-commerce markets (AuthentIC product line). Trained 50 people on Java & Java Card development.
• SchlumbergerSema (6 months) : designed and implemented a Java Card secure filesystem for the Cyberflex smartcard, targeted at the Security market.
• Technical environment : C++, Java, embedded Java, JavaCard, UML

Jun 1998 – May 2000 · 1 yr 11 mos · Paris

• Within the ChorusOS group (real-time UNIX operating system with a microkernel architecture) :
• Developed custom kernel features for a innovative set-top box (the BetaResearch d-box, millions of unit shipped).
• Single-handedly integrated and validated the complete GNU C/C++ cross-development suite (4 hosts, 20+ targets), as part of the first release of ChorusOS officially supported by Sun.
• Acting as last-level support within the Sun support organization, helped customers worldwide on all versions of Chorus and delivered many patches. Traveled on-site to investigate issues in detail.
• Trained customers worldwide on application & device driver development : 15 on-site one-week classes at Sun Microsystems (USA & France), Lucent (Netherlands), Nokia (Finland), Tenovis (Germany), Nortel (Canada & USA).
• Technical environment : Intel, SPARC, PowerPC, C, C++, ChorusOS, UNIX, TCP/IP, SNMP, embedded Java.

May 1997 – May 1998 · 1 yr · Paris

• Designed and implemented a real-time communication layer running on a public-network PBX.
• Successfully completed the V cycle, from specification to live testing.
• Supported application developers by phone & e-mail (20 people in Germany & India).
• Technical environment: Motorola 68k, C, C++, Chorus real-time kernel, UNIX (Solaris), SNMP.

Feb 1997 – May 1997 · 3 mos · Paris

• Provided technical expertise to the Sales/Marketing team on Concert Internet Plus (high-end Internet access for businesses). Presented the product to prospects (mostly ISPs), answered RFPs.
• Mission cut short by BT France / Cegetel merger.

Jan 1994 – Dec 1996 · 2 yrs 11 mos · Paris

• Contributed to a research projet at MASI Laboratory, Paris VI University (distributed system based on the Mach microkernel). Published several peer-reviewed papers (IEEE, IASTED), available on Slideshare: http://fr.slideshare.net/JulienSIMON5
• Taught undergraduate-level Computer Science classes at ISEP, EPITA & ETGL (Algorithms, C, C++, UNIX Kernel, Distributed Systems).
• Sep-Dec 1996 : translated into French a reference book on UNIX : « The Design and Implementation of 4.4BSD », published in France by International Thompson Publishing.