Paris, France

Pierre Thalamy

Lead Software Engineer, Platform & Data at Uptale

I lead the Platform & Data team at Uptale: the accounts, integrations and analytics that every immersive learning experience runs on, plus the backend services and cloud infrastructure underneath. Full-stack by trade, strongest on the backend and infrastructure side. When the team hits friction, I build the tool that removes it. I am AI native: coding agents are part of how I build every day, and what works ends up as reusable skills.

Before industry, I completed a PhD on distributed self-reconfiguration algorithms for modular robots, working towards programmable matter at the FEMTO-ST Institute.

LinkedIn GitHub Google Scholar ResearchGate

C# / .NET ASP.NET Core Azure Terraform React TypeScript C++ Distributed systems AI agents

Selected work

Uptale platform

Accounts, integrations and analytics for Uptale's immersive learning product: the SaaS backbone that Studio and Playtime experiences run on, used by Airbus, Stellantis, L'Oréal and hundreds of other organisations to distribute and track 360° and VR training across headsets, browsers and learning management systems.

.NETAzureTerraform

VisibleSim

Open source C++ simulator for modular robots and programmable matter. I led its development for five years, from a research prototype to a tool used by teams in France, Hong Kong and the United States.

C++OpenGLOpen source

Working with AI

pthalamy/skills on GitHub

I am AI native. Coding agents are part of how I build, every day, at work and outside it, and the leverage is real once you treat them as colleagues who need good instructions: the workflow, the reasoning behind it, and tools to check their own work.

So everything I automate with AI ends up as a reusable skill in a personal collection, written in the open Agent Skills format so it works with any agent: Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Copilot, Gemini CLI. It started with one of my newer pastimes, genealogy research: reading centuries-old parish registers, keeping a family tree where every fact is sourced, and deciding what to look for next.

The domain changes, the method does not. Pick a workflow, encode what a good practitioner knows, give the agent a way to verify itself, and let it take the volume. That is where the 10× comes from, in any setting.

pthalamy/skills

My personal collection of Agent Skills: one folder per workflow I have taught an agent to do well, with references, schemas and Python tooling, plus a validator and an installer for every major agent. The first chain covers genealogy: transcribe an old record, update a GEDCOM family tree only on cited evidence, then plan the next search and log what was not found.

Agent SkillsPythonGenealogyOpen source

Experience

Full CV

Lead Software Engineer, Platform & Data
Uptale, Paris Nov 2020 to present

Uptale lets more than 500 organisations, among them Airbus, Stellantis, TotalEnergies, L'Oréal, Sanofi and Siemens, create, distribute and track 360° and virtual reality training at scale, and raised 9 million euros in 2024 to accelerate. The product has three areas: Studio, where immersive experiences are authored, Playtime, where they are played in headsets and browsers, and Platform, the SaaS backbone that ties everything together. I joined shortly after my PhD, when Uptale was still an early-stage startup, and have grown with it into a fast-scaling company: software engineer, then senior, and lead of the Platform & Data team since February 2026.
- Scaled the platform from a few hundred training sessions a day in 2020 to tens of thousands today, past two million sessions delivered in total, on a backend that still has headroom.
- Took a multi-tenant SaaS to private deployments: the same product now runs in customers' own Azure subscriptions and on premises inside restricted networks, from one shared codebase. Technical lead and first contact for those customers, from project to support.
- Moved the infrastructure to code, Bicep first, then Terraform: production, a US peer region, a production-like staging and the dev environments all come from one codebase, with no drift between them.
- Led the backend migration from ASP.NET MVC to ASP.NET Core and the edge migration from Application Gateway to Azure Front Door.
- Brought backend and infrastructure into ISO 27001 compliance with the CTO and head of engineering, certified in 2025, and have guarded their security since, including the remediation of each yearly penetration test.
- Remove friction for the whole engineering team: scalable CI/CD build agents, faster pull request gates, automated dependency upgrades and branch merges, and the guidelines and skills that developers and AI agents use every day.
C#ASP.NET CoreAzureTerraformReactTypeScript
PhD Researcher in Computer Science
FEMTO-ST Institute, CNRS, Université Bourgogne Franche-Comté 2017 to 2020

Research on distributed intelligence for programmable matter: how large ensembles of simple modular micro-robots can coordinate to rearrange themselves into arbitrary 3D shapes, quickly.
- Designed scaffold-based self-reconfiguration algorithms that bring reconfiguration time down to O(∛N) for classes of shapes, with N the number of modules.
- Technical lead on VisibleSim, the C++ modular robot simulator used by several research teams worldwide.
- Five publications in international journals and conferences (AAMAS, IROS, RAS, SWEVO); thesis defended in October 2020.
- Taught and coordinated undergraduate courses in networking, security and operating systems.
C++Distributed algorithmsMulti-agent systemsSimulation
Research Assistant, Claytronics project
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh 2014, 5 months

Contributed to modular robotics research for programmable matter and implemented in C an embedded virtual machine for the Meld declarative language, later used in teaching and research.