Thomas Barandon
I lead AWS Enterprise Support teams by day and build agentic AI systems by night — including the agent crew that designed and shipped this page.
Senior Manager, AWS Enterprise Support, EMEA South & France — close to a hundred people across four countries.
Live: the stack as a network.
About
Leadership that never left the keyboard.
As Senior Manager for AWS Enterprise Support in EMEA South & France, I lead an organization of close to a hundred people across four countries — a team of managers and their technical account managers — who keep major enterprises succeeding on AWS. I spend as much energy on how the team works as on what it ships.
Fifteen years in IT, eight of them at AWS, took me from the network layer to cloud architecture to leading the people who do both — and I never stopped building. I've learned the business doesn't care how elegant the system is; it cares whether it works, scales, and moves the needle. So that's what I optimize for: teams that ship, customers that trust us, infrastructure that earns its cost.
- 15Years in IT
- 8Years at AWS
- 4Countries in scope
- 3Working languages
Path
From day 3 to here.
Day 3, I knocked on my manager's door convinced they'd made a casting mistake hiring me. The imposter syndrome was loud. It was also lying. Here's what came after.
Amazon Web Services
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April 2023 to present
Senior Manager, AWS Enterprise Support, EMEA South & France
Leading a four-country organization of Enterprise Support Managers and Technical Account Managers, accountable for how major enterprises succeed on AWS across the region — the people, the operating model, the bar.
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May 2020 to September 2023
Manager, AWS Enterprise Support, France
Built the team's operating rhythm and grew its people — and raised the share of women on the team from under one in ten to one in four.
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September 2017 to May 2020
Senior Technical Account Manager
Trusted technical advisor across all phases of the implementation lifecycle for enterprise customers — mitigating risk and optimizing infrastructure for cost, security, and performance.
Orange Business Services
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May 2015 to September 2017
Technical Solutions Architect
Designed and supervised complex network and collaboration deployments for large accounts. Led the technical design authority for large-scale network transformations and unified communications.
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2010 to 2015
Data & Video Support, then Network Engineering
From managed connectivity (Business VPN, Managed LAN) to critical incident resolution on global video and immersive telepresence infrastructure. Where the fundamentals were forged.
I grew up breaking things to understand them. Now I design systems you can trust precisely because I know how they fail.
The night shift
The after-hours stack, drawn as the network it is: the day job, the lab, and the agentic AI that bridges them. Every node is a tool I actually run; the packets are work moving between them. Nothing about it is secret, because nothing about it needs to be — the proof is that it ships. Move the pointer through it. Tap a node to name it.
The network is drawn with JavaScript; the full list is under Daily drivers below.
Focus
Three things I do deeply.
Not forty tags. The work that actually compounds.
Agentic AI & automation
I build agentic systems on AWS Bedrock and in my own lab — an agent crew that runs my infrastructure and designed, reviewed and shipped this site against a brand contract I set. It fails the way real systems fail, so I instrument it first and I merge nothing I haven't read.
The agents do the work; I set the bar and I merge.
- A brand contract in the repository sets the rules: tokens, voice, what never ships.
- Agents design, write and render the pages against it.
- Independent critics, each with a different stake, score every round.
- A pull request lands. I review and I merge.
Cloud leadership
Building and growing high-performing support organizations — managers, TAMs, and the operating culture that keeps enterprise customers succeeding on AWS at scale.
Enterprise transformation
Guiding large enterprises through cloud adoption and change — where the hard part is never the technology, it's the operating model and the people who run it.
This site is a worked example. A brand contract in the repo sets the rules; an agent crew I direct designs, writes and reviews each round against it; I read the pull request and I merge.
Strategic & leadership
- Team leadership 10 yrs
- Cloud strategy 8 yrs
- Digital transformation 8 yrs
- Talent development 6 yrs
Cloud & technical
- Network infrastructure 12 yrs
- AWS architecture 8 yrs
- Security & compliance 8 yrs
- Cost optimization 8 yrs
AI & automation
- Intelligent automation 5 yrs
- Agentic AI 2 yrs
- LLM integration 2 yrs
- AWS Bedrock 2 yrs
Principles
People first
Empower teams to make decisions. Trust is the currency of high-performing organizations.
Automate everything
If you do it twice, automate it, but instrument it first: agents and scripts fail silently.
Build so it survives you
The system you can trust is the one whose failure modes you have already named.
Daily drivers
What I actually use.
Manager by title, engineer by habit.
AWS, Bedrock, Agentic AI, Kiro, Docker, Terraform, Kubernetes, Python, Proxmox, Grafana, Prometheus, PostgreSQL, Redis, Ansible, CloudFormation, GitLab CI, Linux, Nginx, Strands.
Speaking
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2024
AWS Summit Paris 2024 — round table
On imposter syndrome, and the people side of building technical teams.
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June 2024
Le Podcast AWS en Français, with Sébastien Stormacq
Building inclusive teams — what actually moved the number, and what didn't.
Available for talks on cloud leadership at scale and getting agentic AI into production without breaking it.
Voices
Thomas combines deep technical knowledge with a strategic vision that is rare to find. A true leader in cloud transformation.
Former colleague, AWS
His ability to navigate complex organizational challenges while keeping teams focused and delivering at a consistently high bar is impressive.
Senior IT executive, large European enterprise
Besides his outstanding technical skills, Thomas always impressed me with his thinking and pedagogical skills. A genuine booster for the team. I recommend, eyes closed.
Senior cloud architect, enterprise software
Named references available on request.
8,178 m
There's a creature almost no one has heard of: the Mariana snailfish, the deepest-living fish ever filmed, nearly eight kilometers down. No armor, no spikes — a small, soft, almost fragile thing. It doesn't thrive in the most crushing place on Earth by hardening against it, but by quietly adapting until the pressure becomes home.
Pseudoliparis swirei, where it is always night. The operating principle I keep coming back to.
Contact
What's next? Let's talk.
I take on a small number of advisory engagements — founders, CIOs and leadership teams — on cloud strategy, operating models, and getting agentic AI into production without breaking it. Leadership roles and good conversations are welcome too.
Based in the Paris area and working across Southern Europe. Open to new adventures elsewhere.