Greater Paris Metropolitan Region
I'm the AI Operating Partner at Fortino Capital, a European PE firm investing in B2B SaaS. I also run our AI Studio, working hands-on with portfolio companies to make the shift to AI-native software development real, not theoretical. That means pre-investment technical due diligence, engineering org restructuring, AI coding tool rollouts, compliance (GDPR, DORA, EU AI Act), cloud infrastructure economics, and preparing companies for exit. I attend board meetings and dive deep into technical designs. Most people in PE do one or the other. Before Fortino, I spent 30+ years in the industry as an engineer, developer advocate, and technical leader — including time at AWS, Hugging Face, and Arcee AI. I still write code, contribute to open source, and build with the tools I recommend. I write about what I'm seeing on my Substack "The AI Realist", and talk and demo it on YouTube. If you're a CTO or engineering leader trying to figure out what AI-native actually means for your team, your codebase, and your org chart, that's what I cover. https://www.julien.org https://www.youtube.com/@juliensimonfr https://www.airealist.ai https://github.com/juliensimon
I work hands-on with portfolio companies to drive the shift to AI-native software development and customer-facing platforms, from pre-investment technical due diligence through to exit preparation. Day to day: AI feature use cases from idea to production, CTO coaching, engineering org restructuring, AI coding tool strategy and rollout, EU regulatory compliance, and cloud infrastructure sovereignty and economics. Technical strategy advisor to founders, C-level, and partners. Board member at Worklinq.
Chief Evangelist combining executive leadership with daily hands-on engineering to deliver enterprise AI solutions built with open-weight small language models. Benchmarked and deployed language models across CPU, GPU, and AI accelerator platforms, optimizing inference performance for partner and customer environments. Recognized as an Arm Ambassador for AI inference optimization on Arm architectures. Packaged and deployed models into partner cloud services and hardware platforms. Coded high-visibility demonstrations, including the Cisco Live AI showcase, to support partner collaboration and customer adoption. Built and maintained strategic partnerships with AWS, Intel, Arm, and Cisco — joint projects, product integrations, and GTM initiatives. Guided enterprise AI initiatives combining business strategy with hands-on work. Acted as first user of in-development products, feeding detailed feedback into roadmap decisions. Supported pre-sales engagements with technical insight. Created deep technical content: blog posts, industry insights, code. Grew my YouTube channel to 400,000+ subscribers. Speaker at conferences, industry events, and institutions. Technical environment: generative AI models, open-source frameworks (RAG, agents, model merging, model distillation), AI hardware and software for training and inference, multi-cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP), on-premise.
Technical evangelist driving enterprise AI adoption and strategic partnerships, combining executive leadership with hands-on technical expertise. Optimized transformer inference across diverse hardware platforms — Intel/Arm CPUs, Nvidia/AMD GPUs, and specialized AI accelerators (Graphcore, Habana Labs, Trainium, Inferentia). Technical lead on enterprise deployment projects, integrating open-source AI solutions into production environments. Architected private infrastructure deployments (VPC, on-premise) for Fortune 500 customers, driving multi-million dollar revenue opportunities. 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 AWS, Azure, Google, Intel, and AMD. Keynote speaker at AWS, IBM, AMD, and Microsoft events, as well as UNESCO and the NY Fed. Created technical content strategy (blogs, videos, demos) that established company thought leadership. Global media spokesperson (TV, radio, press). Technical environment: transformer models, open-source AI frameworks (RAG, agents), distributed training/inference systems, multi-cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP), hardware acceleration platforms.
Principal Technical Evangelist (2015–2017, France), then Principal Technical Evangelist for AI & ML (2017–2021, global role). Promoted in 2021 to Senior Principal Technical Evangelist — Amazon Level 8, equivalent to Director for individual contributors. An extremely rare achievement at Amazon; I was the second most senior technical evangelist at AWS after Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr. Helped AWS customers worldwide understand and adopt the AI/ML service portfolio. Gave 500+ talks in 40+ countries (AWS events, Velocity, ODSC, and more). Conducted hundreds of 1:1 sessions with customers, from technical teams to Fortune 500 C-level. Worked directly with AWS service teams (EC2, AI/ML, Big Data) to incorporate customer feedback and improve services before launch. Helped launch over 70 services. Authored "Learn Amazon SageMaker", the first book on Amazon SageMaker. Built deep technical content — blogs, videos, demos. Spoke regularly with international press and briefed industry analysts (Gartner, Forrester). 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).
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.