Career Conversation
with Leone Lage Perdigão
Specialist-track positioning: what to build, what to read, what the realistic 12-month trajectory looks like. For engineers pivoting into AI security, governance, or architecture. Read more
Leone Lage Perdigão
Principal AI Architect | ML, GenAI & Agentic Systems at TaoQ AI
Scheduling conflict? No-show? Cancel session & get your money back instantly.
About this session
Specialist-track positioning: what to build, what to read, what the realistic 12-month trajectory looks like. For engineers pivoting into AI security, governance, or architecture.
Your mentor
I am an Independent Principal AI Architect based in the Netherlands, with 15+ years of experience across software engineering, cloud architecture, and AI. I currently lead architecture and R&D at PostNL's AI Centre of Excellence, where I authored the enterprise AI Reference Architecture adopted as the organisational standard for all AI initiatives. Before that, I was an Advisory AI Engineer at IBM, working across the NCEE market on WatsonX deployments and security product R&D for IBM QRadar EDR. I hold an MSc in Artificial Intelligence with Distinction from the University of Bath.
Moreover, I run TaoQ AI (taoq.ai), an independent AI security and EU AI Act governance practice. I maintain Ziran (github.com/taoq-ai/ziran), an open-source AI agent red-teaming framework. I contribute to NVIDIA Garak and Hugging Face Transformers.
WHAT I MENTOR ON
I work best with mentees who want to move into one of the following specialist tracks:
• AI architecture for production systems: designing and mantaining enterprise AI stacks across Generative AI, Agentic AI, MLOps, and edge deployment. What breaks in production and why.
• AI agent security and red-teaming: prompt injection, tool chain attacks, multi-phase trust exploitation, testing methodology. Hands-on with Ziran, Garak, and Promptfoo.
• EU AI Act compliance for engineers: classification under Article 6, conformity assessment, Annex IV technical file preparation. Regulation read as engineering, not as a compliance checkbox.
• Career transitions into AI specialist tracks: how engineers, security professionals, and governance people actually move into senior AI roles. Realistic timelines, portfolio building, positioning.
What mentees say
“I had the pleasure of working with Leone as my technical mentor during a hands-on Gen AI engineering study plan, and I cannot recommend him highly enough. From day one, he brought the perspective of a senior engineer — …”
Millie
Lite Plan · 1 month
“Leone is an amazing mentor. Had great time with him coaching me on my next steps to shift my career to management. He shared his experience, motivations, helped me to createa list of skills i should work on. Over all, I…”
Antonella
Standard Plan · 1 month
“I was feeling a bit stuck in my career and a bit unsure of my next steps so I started to look for mentorship. My experience with Leone has been exactly what I expected when searching for mentorship: someone able to u…”
Pedro
Standard Plan · 1 month
“I am very satisfied with my mentor. He built a clear program for me to improve my technical and professional skills in the field of AI. He is always available for questions, easy to talk to, and provides a very professi…”
Ran
Standard Plan · 2 months
Frequently asked questions
What exactly is a session?
A session is a focused one-on-one call with your mentor. Use it to get feedback, work through a specific problem, review your work, or get unstuck. You reserve up to 1 hour of their time.
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