A direction, not a new job title
I want to be closer to what comes next.
I've spent a lot of my career helping complicated digital services work better. Increasingly, I'm interested in what becomes possible when the tools change, the right people get together and we're given enough room to find out.
This isn't another CV or an attempt to rebrand what I've already done. It's where I'd like the next part of my career to take me, and why.
Read on01 / The pull
The interesting bit is finding out what we can make.
Applied AI and emerging technology have made it possible to experiment with ideas that, not so long ago, would have required a sizeable team just to get off the starting line. That changes who can explore a problem and how quickly we can learn whether an idea is worth pursuing.
I want to be enabled by those tools, and to help other people be enabled by them too. To explore, make prototypes, break assumptions, understand the limitations and turn the things that work into something genuinely useful.
I'm not looking to become the person inventing a new model architecture or writing a mathematical thesis. I am interested in understanding these technologies well enough to use them intelligently, challenge them properly and work alongside the people with the specialist skills to take them further.
02 / What I bring
I tend to see the things between the things.
My background is in quality, delivery, platforms and product leadership. I've spent years moving between teams, technologies, suppliers and customer journeys, working out why the apparently simple problem isn't actually simple at all.
That's useful when exploring something new. Somebody has to connect the technical opportunity to the people it might help, the systems it needs to fit, the risks it introduces and the decisions that will determine whether it survives beyond a demo.
I enjoy working with people who know their craft, making space for them to do their best work, asking the awkward questions early and helping promising ideas become workable services. I don't need to be the most technically gifted person in the room. I do need to understand enough to contribute properly and make good decisions with those who are.
03 / Where I'd go
More curiosity. More capability. More useful outcomes.
Not a rigid five-year plan. A direction I can actually test.
Get closer to the technology.
Spend more time prototyping with modern AI, automation and development tools. Learn by building, evaluating and discovering what falls apart, not by collecting certificates.
Work alongside the specialists.
Bring engineers, architects, researchers and product people together around real problems. Give the work direction without trying to pretend their expertise is mine.
Turn experiments into lasting capability.
Build the teams, practices and confidence to take useful ideas into production, measure whether they helped and make the next experiment a little easier.
04 / What I still have to earn
Enthusiasm isn't a substitute for experience.
I haven't spent a decade as a hands-on machine-learning engineer, and I won't pretend otherwise. There are things I want to get substantially better at: how AI systems are evaluated, where agentic workflows fail, the trade-offs around security, reliability and cost, and what good engineering practice looks like when AI becomes part of the development process.
Some of that can be learned through my own experiments. More of it comes from being close to good engineers, taking responsibility for outcomes and getting the chance to work on problems with consequences beyond a prototype.
The aim isn't to change the adjectives on my CV. It's to build enough capability and evidence that the next step becomes an honest one.
05 / The environment
Good people, difficult problems, a reason to care.
I'd love to be part of an organisation that takes emerging technology seriously without mistaking novelty for progress. Somewhere that values experimentation, brings different disciplines together and gives people both the trust and accountability to explore ideas properly.
I want to help shape the questions, work with the people who can answer the hardest ones, and play a meaningful part in turning the answers into something that matters.
Perhaps the right opportunity is a role in applied AI, technology innovation, engineering enablement or an ambitious product organisation. Perhaps it has a title none of us have settled on yet. I'm less interested in the label than the work and the people around it.
Meanwhile, I'm making things
The useful part is doing the work.
You can see some of that curiosity taking shape in my experiments, including Platform Archaeology. They're works in progress, with the limitations made clear, because showing what hasn't been proven yet matters too.