Engineering Manager, North — built to ship and lead.

I'm not stepping back — I'm stepping toward the work I find most energising. As CIO, my best days are when I'm in the room with a customer, translating an ambiguous problem into a product decision, then leading the team to ship it. The agency overhead — business development, billing, vendor management — has grown around that core. The North EM role is the core, full-time, with frontier AI infrastructure behind it. That's not a step back; it's focus.

On the TypeScript / React / Postgres side I'm ready from day one — that's my primary production stack. For Python and Kubernetes, I won't oversell the depth I don't have, but I can be specific about what I do have: Python is where I already do agentic AI and data work; Kubernetes is a deployment target I understand conceptually from Cloud Run and containerised workloads. The engineering discipline the role requires — typed contracts, CI gates, observability, testability — is language and runtime agnostic. I close both ramps fastest by owning real North services from day one, not by studying in isolation. I'd be at productive depth within two to four weeks.

I've held both roles simultaneously for a decade, so the rhythm is natural: I use management overhead as a forcing function to be a better senior engineer, not a reason to go fully IC. The lead by example discipline — reviewing PRs carefully, pairing on hard problems, setting architectural bar in writing — is what builds the team's craft over time. I protect the ICs from context-switching; I take the coordination cost on myself. The player-coach model only works if the coach still plays, and I do.

They're not in tension. Psychological safety is the mechanism by which the team surfaces problems early — and early is when problems are cheapest to fix. I run 1:1s focused on blockers and growth, not status. I model honesty about my own gaps (the Python / Kubernetes ramp on this application, for instance), which gives the team permission to be honest about theirs. The high-performance bar comes from clarity: clear success criteria, clear code standards, clear architectural principles in writing. People thrive when they know what 'done well' looks like.

North. It's the most serious enterprise deployment platform in the field — sovereign, secure, privacy-first, designed for the regulated industries where real enterprise adoption happens. My decade of scar tissue is in exactly those industries: HIPAA at EKAGRA, GDPR at Jamahook, OIDC/RBAC at Anygum. The North EM role is a chance to lead a team building infrastructure that enterprise customers can actually trust with sensitive data, powered by frontier models. That intersection of technical depth, compliance-as-a-product-surface, and AI is where my work is most compounded.

I want to relocate — this isn't 'open to it', it's a deliberate next chapter. Toronto is always my first choice: it's Cohere's co-HQ and the centre of the North team's gravity, I've already lived six months in and around the city, and I've built real professional and personal ties with clients there and in Montreal — so being there puts me in the same building as the people I'd manage and on the ground where I already have roots. London is a strong second: my sister lives there, my best friend is a short hop away in Norway, and it's Cohere's European hub — which would put me closer to the regulated enterprise customers North exists to serve. Europe more broadly (Paris, Dublin, Amsterdam) works too: Cohere has offices and customers across the continent, and being in-timezone with them closes the gap between the team and the field. I process the visa (Canadian work permit, or UK Skilled Worker / EU Blue Card) in parallel with any offer and commit to local presence from week one. See my full relocation intent for Toronto and London.