An engineering leader who ships frontier AI — and grows the people who ship it.

Because this is the part of leadership I love most, stripped of the agency overhead. As CIO my role drifted into running a client-services business; what lights me up is leading a delivery team in the room with customers — growing people, owning outcomes, and still shipping myself. A Manager, FDE seat at OpenAI is exactly that work, applied to frontier models, with the leverage of a world-class platform behind me. I'd rather build and grow that field team from the inside than keep running a product engineering venture firm from the outside.

Fair — and I won't overstate it. But the engineers I managed did exactly forward-deployed work: embedded with clients, shipping production software on their stacks under real pressure. I grew that team to 22, moved it remote-first, and coached and mentored people into strong next steps abroad — the same primitives this role needs (staffing, growing people, owning end-to-end delivery, codifying what works). What's new is OpenAI's scale and the frontier-lab context, and I'd close that by listening and learning the existing playbooks first, not importing a product engineering venture firm's process. I bring a decade of deployment scar tissue most first-time lab managers don't have.

Clarity, trust, and growth. I set a high, explicit bar and give direct, actionable feedback, then get out of people's way — I run remote-first on shared context and outcomes rather than ceremony, which is how we hit +50% productivity and +100% satisfaction when we went distributed. I coach deliberately: career-growth pathways, stretch ownership, and handing real responsibility early — which is why people I've grown have gone on to lead at organisations in Norway and take strong next steps abroad. Process exists to serve clarity; the moment it becomes the point, I cut it.

Translating across functions is the founder-CIO's daily job — I'm equally comfortable scoping with a customer's executives, aligning on a product roadmap, and pairing with an engineer on the hard part, and I've partnered directly with client CTOs to land delivery. On the external side I'm genuinely public-facing: I host technical webinars (a GitOps with Terraform series), publish engineering pattern papers and a national op-ed, build in public at hackathons, and teach publicly with relentless consistency (a 906-day French streak as @FrenchwithFauzul). For an FDE manager that presence is real leverage — it builds customer trust, represents the team well externally, and turns what the field learns into playbooks and content the wider developer community can actually use. Modern field leadership is part-engineer, part-communicator, and I've been doing both in public for years.

It's how I've always worked. I came up as a UX Engineer, grew through Principal Staff SWE into management, and still ship — a Claude-powered natural-language CMS runs in production for a real client, and I build agentic products in public. I can sit with a customer to scope a use case, sketch the flow in Figma, write the tricky service in Go or Python, and reason about the business case — so I set the bar by example and earn the team's trust technically. The leadership doesn't replace the building; it multiplies it.

I'll be honest rather than name-drop: what I've shipped has been Claude-led, and that integrity matters to me. But leading FDE work isn't about which model — it's about taking frontier models into the messy reality of enterprise and growing a team that does it reliably, then feeding what the field learns back to Research and Product. That skill is model-agnostic, and I've proven it: an LLM in a client's production stack, plus a decade of leading customer-facing delivery. I'm genuinely eager to go deep on OpenAI's stack, and I'd rather be the leader who's candid about where he's coming from and ramps visibly than one who oversells.

Yes — I'm intentional about basing this chapter in London (my sister is here and I've supported Arsenal since 2003, so it's a genuine, durable move), comfortable on a 3-day in-office cadence, and ready for the customer travel. I've led distributed teams and delivered for London, Zurich, Oslo and Sandnes clients for years, so balancing on-site team leadership with field travel is familiar. I relocate as soon as the UK Skilled Worker visa processes and start on local hours from day one.